Michelle Phd Thesis FINAL with Corrections 30.11.2020

Order of Our Lady Cicada

and

Mapping (non)representations of metamorphoses, tricksters and insects through seven stories

Michelle Braunstein, B.Soc.Sci, B.A(Hons), Grad Dip.Ed

This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Murdoch University, 2019 Declaration

I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, it contains no material previously published or written by another person nor material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma of a university or other institute of higher learning, except where due acknowledgment has been made in the text.

2 Abstract

This doctoral thesis in creative writing comprises a novella — Order of Our Lady Cicada — and an exegesis which maps (non)representations of metamorphoses, tricksters and insects through seven stories. The creative writing component is a literary artefact and a piece of research in itself. The exegesis is a further construction of new knowledge, addressing the novella among six other literary texts. The two pieces — novella and exegesis — are imbricated and both draw on theories from post-humanism, including New Materialisms and critical animal studies. Overall, this thesis problematises both representation and liberal humanism, seeking a corporeal relation with insects, tricksters and metamorphoses in the texts without settling on easy meaning-making. I have formed the two components of the dissertation by engaging methodologies of rhizomatic research, phenomenological research, “agnostic” research, voice-hearing and ficto-criticism.

3 Acknowledgements

It is because of many beings and becomings that this doctoral project has been possible.

I am in immense gratitude for all of the support that has inspired, nurtured and energised me throughout this process.

I am deeply appreciative of the love, wisdom, provocations, beauty, suggestions, stillnesses, collaborations, conversations, challenges, insights, interventions, encouragement and cups of tea from and with:

David Moody, Simone Lazaroo, Anthony Hack, Willa Hack, Esther Braunstein, Danny Braunstein, Jack Braunstein, Jude Braunstein, Anna Braunstein, Tiffany Gee, Toby Kennedy, Steve Dyer, Sandra Antunes, Kate Balme, Ikuko Takahashi, Gyanamala Hooke, Yuko Fujiwara, Jaya Penelope Mullumby, Gwydion Mullumby Dubh, Karun Cowper, Fefe Twaits, Fausto Buttà, Brigitte Rieder, Fumie Tsuru, Zinta Vilde, Lian Sinclair, Dean Merlino, Sudeep Lingamneni, David Cross, Jem No- ble, James Oliver, Patricia Moynihan, Laurel Cohn, Geraldine Devas, Kelly Kodama Hamilton, Ryuji Kodama, Mira Gojak, Fiona Huxley, Christina Leach, Tori Kennedy, Thea Rogers, Tracey Haras, Jo Violet, Jacqui Hagendoorn, Serina Mukerjee, Joy Mukerjee, Amber Galbraith, Kathryn Vincent, Samantha Parke, Guy Boneseed Brunette, Neil “Pipe” McCann, Sarah Craig, Luke Craig and of course, Magda Levy, Iboga tabernanthe and the ancestors.

4 Table of contents

Declaration i Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Introduction 1 Order of Our Lady Cicada 6 Exegesis Title Page 91 Chapter One: Literature Review 94 Animals/Insects: (Non)representations and Metamorphoses/Becomings. 95 The trickster figure 111 Chapter Two: Methodology 119 Chapter Three: The Beetle’s Hum 131 Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis 133 Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild 144 Chapter Four: I Heard a Fly Buzz — When I Died 154 George Langelaan’s short story “The Fly” 155 Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film The Fly 163 David Cronenberg’s 1986 film The Fly 169 Chapter Five: Two Bloods 180 Two Bloods Part I 180 Two Bloods Part II 196 (Non)conclusion.. 209 Works cited 212

5 Introduction

(Image courtesy of Darvil McBride)

From your hips down to your feet I want to make a long journey. I am smaller than an insect. Pablo Neruda

This doctoral thesis centres on a new work of creative writing, a novella called Order of Our Lady Cicada, and also comprises an exegesis, “Mapping (non)representations of metamorphoses, tricksters and insects through seven stories.” The creative writing component is a literary artefact and a project of research in itself. The exegesis is a further construction of new knowledge, addressing the novella among six other literary texts. The central question I am asking is, in the context of the An- thropocene, what theories inform (non)representations of insects, tricksters and metamorphoses in literature and how can these, alongside practice-based research, trace the quest to “become”? My practice-based thesis in creative writing draws on post-humanist theories to trace (non)representations of insects, tricksters and metamorphoses through seven stories. The two pieces — novella and exegesis — are not two separate processual currents. They have always been imbricated, provoking and stimulating one another throughout the process of making them. The topic itself is about de-centring the concept of the disembodied and immaterial mind toward the larger political project of unthinking and undoing liberal humanism. Appropriately, my creative praxis (the novella and the ficto-critical piece) are an embodied means for locating and constructing knowledge. I use them to trouble the liberal humanist paradigm, because of the obvious system failures of capitalism and liberalism—ideologies spawned from humanism—and the Anthropocene throws the importance of doing so into sharp relief.1 I am not attempting here to propose an alternative model or to create more territory; my intervention and provocation is oriented around undoing and unmaking, a continual work of decolonising totalised systems of meaning. My process in making these works has been nomadic and non-teleological. As part of this, I have purposefully adopted reticence to conclude or make closed, linear analysis in the exegesis or concrete meaning in the fiction. In all parts and as a whole, this dissertation is an exploration. In this project, I explore ways that insects are (non)represented, without basing my study in science: entomology is a wide and varied field, and I make no scientific truth claims here about insects or their behaviours. Rather, I map non(representations) of insects, using critical theory, as well as my creative process, as tools to do so. As part of this, I problematise representation as a way of

1 According to Tom Cohen, Were a malicious god to entertain herself by giving 21st century mortals a shiny-toy word-name to chatter as distraction about while tipping points passed which ren- dered their doom irreversible, that word-name, self-regarding, would be “the An- thropocene.” (1)

Indeed, I include the term with the awareness that it has commanded a certain gloss or name-drop kudos amongst scholars since it was first coined by Crutzen in 2000, who reported in 2002, For the past three centuries, the effects of humans on the global environment have escalated. Because of these anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, global cli- mate may depart significantly from natural behaviour for many millennia to come. It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene — the warm period of the past 10–12 millennia. The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane.

Implicit in naming the present epoch the Anthropocene is a sense of meta-temporality and of transcendence, as though the term is being articulated by future scientists looking back; as though we have surpassed ourselves somehow. There are other names too for this era of melting ice sheets, extreme weather events, mass extinctions and displacements, such as “capitalocene” (Moore 6) and the “necrocene” (O’Brien 116). I would argue, that no matter how precise thinkers become at articulating this era, the fact remains that these are indeed “shiny-toy word-names to chatter” (Cohen 1) while we lurch further and further into irreversible damage. 2 knowing, and consider a more nuanced Deleuzian approach, that “we can, and should, intuit the forces of desire that produce representations” (Colebrook xxxii), rather than interrogate representation alone. I also engage with the ideas of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, who, in Production of Presence: what meaning cannot convey, attempts to dethrone the dominance of the concept of meaning in the humanities, because “it is time to break certain discursive taboos (time to get one’s hands dirty)” (78). He proposes various concepts to help overcome the “exclusive status of interpretation in the humanities” (78), among them, delineating meaning-cultures and presence-cultures which can be looked to in order to theorise beyond hermeneutics (80). While I am making some meaning in this thesis — this is inescapable — I specifically work with Gumbrecht’s interrogation by dethron- ing attempts at transcendent meaning, as contained in metaphor, instead exploring that which is more immanent, concrete and therefore powerfully present through my chosen works. I am also inspired by theory from within New Materialism, particularly the ways in which this theoretical province locates post-structuralist theory in a more material and intimately embodied way than its linguistic counterparts. The concept of metamorphosis, rather than metaphor, is key within New Materialist conceptions of fictional insectoid embodiment, and I locate this project within the foregrounded immanence of this distinction, looking particularly to Rosi Braidotti (16-171) as a key informant. I also explore how tricksters, as creatures/agents of metamorphoses, hybridity, chaos and fluidity, can be invoked when (non)representing insects as transformative others. Kari Weil is another theorist whose critical animal studies interventions into the humanity/animality dichotomy inform the study (19-27). As I have mentioned, the overall theoretical approach I have applied to mapping (non)representations of trickster insects and metamorphoses in various texts is a post-humanist one. While there are many threads within the great and complex theoretical fabric which has been identified as post-humanism, the one within which I am locating my thesis is not post-humanist as understood in a linear or teleological sense. Nor is it one that directly makes a case for the enhancement of humanity through technology (while I do not outrightly reject this, it is not the focus of my project). Rather, the post-humanism which informs this project is less a vision and more a version. I approach the topic from a non-teleological, critical perspective; that is, I am positioning my project as part of a broader argument for the de-centring of the liberal humanist project and its constructed architect, the reified and imagined western mind. This dissertation is located within the call for the emergence of a becoming-human framework; one which addresses “human” as being composite, hybridised and in a constant flow of metamorphoses, rather than treating it notionally, transcenden- tally and statically. 3 I also place emphasis here on the idea and process of emergence as distinct from telos. To be more specific, I am not suggesting an end-point or a closed system for human becoming, human/ animal relations or for the construction of society. Rather, I am attempting to work beyond representation as a purely linguistic, semiotic or pictorial process and am mapping “the force and creation” (Colebrook xxxii) behind representations of trickster insects, through the seven texts examined in the thesis. Indeed, I will be asking less “what a text means, but how it works” (Colebrook xxxii). This Deleuzian approach to representation necessitates an exploration of what certain representations do, and also what the forces are which propel them. To unpack this further, I will be looking more concretely and corporeally at the texts, interrogating what is behind or beyond their representations — such as desire as a force for agency or simply for itself — without extrapolating these out to broader, grander narrative trajectories which have tended most often to lead back to Freudian or Marxist thought. In a similar vein, instead of dealing with these representations of insects as metaphors for human experiences, I am looking, as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Rosi Braidotti have, to insectoid metamorphoses, because “insects are powerful indicators of the de-centring of anthropocentrism and point to post-human sensibilities and sexualities” (105). As a denizen of the plane of immanence, through my creative and exegetical work, I attempt to “kill metaphor” (Deleuze and Guat- tari 70) and argue that there is no separate transcendent metaphoric realm, rather “a distribution of states that is part of the range of the world” (Deleuze and Guattari 22). The first part of the dissertation is my novella, Order of Our Lady Cicada. Following this, the texts that I explore in order to map (non)representations of trickster insect metamorphoses are Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild, George Langelaan’s “The Fly” and the two films which are based upon it from 1958 and 1986. I will also interrogate my own work, Order of Our Lady Cicada and, by engaging ficto-critical method, the protagonist from the latter, Magda, will conduct a reading of I Am The Woo, a phantom text both written and unwritten by me. It is difficult to trace the genesis of my creative work, as it was never so linear as to have a single origin; however I can say that one day, after some years of anarchist praxis, followed by a period of working metamorphically with the trauma that I have carried throughout much of my life, through daily spiritual practice and ritual/therapeutic work, the voice of the protagonist, Magda, emerged clearly and coherently in my mind and she had a story to tell. Magda was also quite informative about how her story would work together with the exegesis, yet to instrumentalise her as some kind of self-reflexive device would only feed the erroneous humanist notion that there is a centralised self that is coordinating this project. The self or the “I” which is here attempting to un- 4 pack Magda’s role in the overall project is not the manager; rather a facilitator, and in allowing Magda to speak, I argue that she is a being in her own right, albeit a taboo one, from a liberal humanist perspective. Later I refer to the literary precedent of voice-hearing and the interdisciplinary study unit based at Durham University, United Kingdom, which is devoted to it, to further contextualise it as a creative phenomenon. In terms of other influences, the overall project has been informed by the other creative texts that I discuss in the thesis, as well as the theory that I have engaged with. In turn, the creative work has informed the exegesis and has been inseparable from my own metamorphic process as a writer- researcher-subject-mother-Other over the three and a half years that I have been engaging in the doctoral process. The practice component of the dissertation, Order of Our Lady Cicada, follows.

5 Order of Our Lady Cicada

6 They had barely been aware of my absence, let alone noticed what I’d become. Not at first, anyway.

The cicadas had continued to sing, right up until I left. That was the first thing Bron and Tomas mentioned when I asked what I’d missed. Some nights they’d even come to rest on the fly screens, peering in at the household. Emissaries, they must’ve been. But then the fire happened, Bron and Tomas said. For a moment, it made me forget everything, as though the flames lived on, burning everything I’d experienced and what I was now, down to rubble. The autumn light faded and twilight began its ambush softly, softly as the boys reenacted their escape from the blaze. Bron gestured wildly, spitting as he spoke about the thick smoke and the way he’d pulled his body along the floor, not knowing if the screaming red trucks would reach them in time. The tower of flames had redoubled and danced, raging. I could taste his terror, could feel the superhuman strength that had enabled him to escape. Or was it dumb luck? None of us knew. Tomas was quieter, the calmest I’d ever seen him, and sober too. He said it’d been the beginning of an end that needed to happen, because neither of them could have continued on as they had been. The fire had spared them — this had to be a sign, an omen, synchronicity, a message from someone, something, they both assured me. Of what, or from whom, they hadn’t been sure, but it was an end and it was a sign, that much was clear. I realised I had better tell them my part of the story, pinpointing the beginning as the moment I met Kyoko. We were standing before grimy mirrors in the beachside change-rooms, negotiating hair. She gathered hers in sections, combing and drying them as she went, using a small cordless hair dryer. These efforts produced a sleek sheet of hair like black water, while my use of a plastic hairbrush seemed only to turn my ocean-matted clumps to auburn fairy floss. With heavy-lidded eyes stinging from salt, I watched her twist her locks into a loose bun atop her head and fasten it with a simple wooden clip. ‘I like your…’ I started to say, ‘hair’ but felt cloying, so I said, ‘clip’ at the last moment, which made it sound more like ‘hlip'. ‘Eh?’ She looked bemused as our eyes met in the speckled bathroom mirror. ‘You’ve got a nice clip.’ I attempted a small smile and dropped my gaze to the floor. I noticed her feet were small in a pair of yellow sandshoes. They seemed ideal companions with her white and red streetwear and her black, black hair. ‘Thank you. I like your hair,’ she replied, pointing to my chaotic mop.

7 No, you don’t, I thought and blushed about her lie, bringing my fingers to my salt-crusted scalp to scratch and release some sand. After smiling introductions, we walked out of the change room together, making small talk about this and that. She was Japanese (I’d already guessed). I was a local (she didn’t seem surprised). Gulls squawked over v-shaped sandwich crusts left on the grass, while the family who’d failed to eat or bin them squabbled all the way to their SUV parked nearby. Strains of dub music drifted from a sound system somewhere and hippies twirled fire sticks. Their seriousness and respect for their flames made me envious as I had no such passion for anything. The smell of the burning fuel connected me with impressions and feelings I couldn’t name. My stomach began rumbling and roiling, a memo that I’d been missing too many meals. In the months leading up to meeting Kyoko, I hadn’t been good at noticing what I needed, until my hungry ghosts began to growl in other people’s ears, like my father’s. Every time I’d see him he’d try to foist beans, stews, rice and puddings onto me, packaging them up with warnings that I’d disappear if I didn't eat more. That’s the idea, I’d think, but never say. Kyoko must’ve heard the growling ghosts too, for she reached into her bag, pulled from it a rice ball wrapped in cellophane and handed it to me in one smooth motion. Too hungry for the sort of pride or manners that might’ve dictated I object, and too tired to try to make myself disappear, I thanked her instead and bit into it, tasting salty seaweed, sesame seeds and vinegary rice. We walked together to the rocks as the sun finally slipped below the horizon. A work-in-progress of mauves and pinks streaked the sky while we found some smooth flat rocks to sit on amongst the jagged outcrop. She mentioned Kafka early on, but it was only in passing and not in any kind of pretentious name-dropping way. It was something about insects, which I didn’t quite catch, but found it strikingly coincidental that she would mention them. She offered me a stick of plum-flavoured chewing gum and I took it from her, all the while watching a lone crab scuttle along and disappear into a small hole in a rock. I popped and cracked the gum between my tongue and teeth and after some particularly satisfying snaps, I began to tell her about the insect that I knew. Little by little, it had been sucking the life-force from me, making me wonder if, eventually, it would take the very last of my share. It didn’t exist physically as something I could swat or ex- terminate. Nor was it a concept, so there was no hope of blocking it out with positive thinking. Such attempts would only make it throw its head back and laugh thunderingly, cruelly, before feasting on my energy yet again. It always seemed to know what I was thinking, that was the other thing. Night after night, no matter where I slept or tried to rest, it would locate me in the realm between my sleeping and waking state, sometimes charming me with trickery, other times cutting straight to the 8 feast. I told Kyoko right there on the rocks that I was nigh on resigned to a life arrested in fear and trembling, in the thrall of this being, or this happening, whatever it was. She responded to my confession with a sound that reminded me of wails of a tiny siren, a kind of elongated ‘eh?’ It was an odd sort of conversation to have with a stranger, but I’d nothing to lose. Roll the dice, who cares? I thought. She would return to Japan, I would return to my life. The moon began to rise and we receded, back to street lights and hippies dancing with fire, in a frenzy now, to faster, harder music. We walked slowly up the main street to the centre of town, the beats following us, a soundtrack to our conversation, which had shifted from my strange problem to Japan. She feared that her home town of Ibaraki had been contaminated by nuclear waste, because of Fukushima. She said while it was her true spiritual home, she would never return there for any decent length of time until she knew for sure that it was safe. ‘How do you afford to travel?’ I asked her straight out. Money was so often on my mind, tediously. We passed a group of young people kicking a loaf of artisanal bread wrapped in brown paper. Kyoko answered she was part of an organisation of sorts, a kind of school. ‘A school?’ I asked, curiosity turning my voice slightly shrill. ‘Yes. We learn about… we collect…’ She trailed off. ‘Learn about what? Collect what?’ I almost demanded. ‘In Japan most people are seeking novelty.’ She exhaled slowly and pulled a face powder compact in the shape of a ladybird from her hand-bag. I turned it over in my hands, thinking she must be some kind of trader of junk. ‘Here too, I suppose. Why are they?’ I asked, passing the compact back to her. ‘Maybe some have too much money, or maybe they are trying to distract themselves…?’ ‘From what?’ ‘The abyss, I guess?’ I uttered a small ‘oh,’ heavy with the sense that existential terror and loneliness prevailed collectively. But my curiosity soon eclipsed the feeling. ‘Well, so, what do you study and collect? Make-up?’ I couldn’t help but feel I was trotting beside her like a little puppy. I slowed my pace and she did too. ‘No, not that!’ she chirped. ‘Other kinds of oddities!’ Her face split into a wide smile. Just then, we arrived at her hostel. In the lobby, zany murals of nubile aliens and forest nymphs shouted at us. I followed her down a corridor until she stopped outside one of the rooms. While she rummaged through her bag to find her keys, I studied the hostile margarine yellow walls and couldn’t help but imagine all kinds of fungal infections. 9 ‘I find it aids me in my quests, to stay in places like this,’ Kyoko assured me, perhaps aware that I was recoiling from the environment. Her keys finally emerged with a tiny jangle. There were so many things I wanted to ask her, but before I could, she thanked me for walking her home. Our night together was over. She must’ve sensed my silent despair as she invited herself to my place for breakfast the following morning. Before I could answer, a pair of travellers reddened by sun and drink passed us in the hallway, their shouted critique of the surf peppered with ‘shits’ and ‘fucks’. I huddled closer to Kyoko to enable them to pass, nodding keenly and simultaneously wondering what I would offer her to eat. ‘What is your address, Magda?’ She raised her strange and magnificent eyebrows expectant- ly. They were sparse but still somehow covered a significant area. I told her and she penned it into her phone with a slender silver stylus. She let herself into her room and dipped her head in a bow of farewell. I walked home, now oblivious to the Friday night bedlam of town, a delighted daze carrying me on its wings. At home, the boys were arguing and pacing at right angles in the kitchen. I almost collided with Tomas on my way in. He was oblivious to my presence, giving me an empty stare and continuing his diatribe on occultism and Nazism. I sensed plastic barrels, rubber pistons, cold steel, narcotic trails. I made a move towards the kettle, trying to dodge Bron, but he went out of his way to cackle in my face. Shushing them both in a cursory way, I watched my warning smash against the glass of their indifference, like bugs on the windshields of speeding cars. I’d seen them like this many times before. As I poured boiling water over some noodles, Bron began to shout, splicing personal jabs into their debate, which had morphed to the merits of demonology. I decided to wait for the noodles to soften in my room and leave the boys to their sigils, taxonomies and whatever sub-texts they were bickering about. Shrill, sarcastic laughter from one of them followed me down the hall. I closed the door on it and sat down on my bed, kicking away a rumpled sheet to clear a space for my bowl. Stirring in the flavour from the sachets gave the noodles a subtly fluorescent sheen. After a few gulps I’d had enough and scrabbled through my bedside drawer for a pair of earplugs. Finding them, I shaped them into little nuggets and shoved them into my ears. Lying in the silence, the bedsheet was cool against the heat of my sunburned skin. I closed my eyes and in my mind I could still see the ocean glittering, could feel the waves breaking against my body, at first cajoling, then pushing, pulling, until I tumbled with them. Around and around I 10 went, drawn beneath as though by thousands of tiny hands. Again and again I’d emerge, gasping for air, only for the cycle to repeat. Then, after my swim (which had really been more a kind of tussle with the ocean), half prone, I’d watched the heaving tide. From my place of respite on the hot sand, I’d wondered if the sea had also felt me with its watery hands. Soon after, I’d met Kyoko.

In the early hours I woke sweating, perturbed by the perfect silence. Often, it was worse not hearing Bron and Tomas fighting, as I could never be sure that they hadn’t killed each other in the night. I rose and surveyed the house, finding each of them passed out in their beds, empty beer bot- tles and prescription blister packs on nightstands. Reading the scene, I recognised the programme: awake for days on end, chased down by anti-psychotic pills. I padded into the dingy kitchen, much of the morning light blocked by townhouses on either side of our place. I switched on the light before it flickered several times and went out. In the gloom, the silver and gold star pattern on the white linoleum was barely visible; it all looked muted and smudged. The timber cupboards, painted white likely a decade before, appeared grey too in the half light. Somehow, though, the disaster zone left over from Bron’s and Tomas’s bender showed up in technicolour. Depleted nitrous oxide bulbs and screwed-up pie wrappers surrounded dirty plates. Trails of ants marched over empty cans. Overwhelmed, I stood still for a time, not knowing where to begin cleaning, or if I even should. I stopped scanning the detritus, dumped the dishes in the sink and filled it with hot water and detergent. I stuffed the rubbish into a bag and wiped the benches down. I checked the time. Kyoko was due in five minutes and knowing there was little chance we had a spare light globe anywhere, in the dimness I managed to plug in the kettle. The outline of the socket lit up bright green and a small arc of sparks flew from it. I switched it off and withdrew the plug. It was not the first time the wiring had demonstrated that it was failing, but I had no time to worry about it and boiled water on the gas stove instead. I met Kyoko at the front door and placed her bowl of noodles in her hands. Nodding towards the house, I advised her not to enter. ‘For your own safety,’ I added. She accepted this and we sat together on the front step. Looking out across the garden, I realised it had become a graveyard. The drought had caused the trees to suck so much moisture from the earth that great swathes of parched grass encir- cled them, even drier than the grass beyond. Many of the trees had begun dropping limbs into their 11 dusty circles. I meditated on the harrowing scene while trying to stomach my noodles. Kyoko slurped away while explaining that in Japan, people had a habit of tearing down buildings and re- constructing them. ‘It’s been going on for a very long time in Japan.’ I couldn't tell whether she approved of this or not. Nor could I understand the relevance of her comments, but I let it slide. ‘I’d like to go to Japan sometime,’ I remarked, knowing I could barely afford a trip into the city. ‘You’d better stay away from areas of nuclear contamination, which might be tricky, but apart from that, you may very much love a trip there.’ The only survivor of the apocalypse in our garden was a robust Moreton Bay Fig, near the side of the house. Kyoko craned her neck around me to look up into its canopy. From somewhere else, the smell of rotting vegetation wafted into my nostrils but it wasn’t unpleasant. When we’d both finished the noodles, I took the bowls inside and set about boiling more water on the stove for some tea. I had reminded Kyoko strictly not to breach the threshold, so I jumped when I heard someone come up behind me. It was only Bron though, waxy skinned and sunken eyed.‘Piss’oles in the snow!’ I almost joked, but didn’t. He didn’t look in the mood for such a jab. He turned a few circles in the middle of the room as though searching for something and walked silently out again. I returned to the verandah with cups of mint tea. Kyoko was patting the neighbour’s fierce ginger cat which sat on the fence. Cooing to it, she didn’t seem bothered by its torn ears and the way its brow hung over its eyes, giving it a permanent scowl. A butterfly danced around their heads, dripping movement and light. I sipped my tea and crackled with nervous energy. After we’d drunk the tea and I’d returned the cups to the kitchen, we decided to go for a walk. It was then, side by side, while we sweated and ambled down side streets and lane-ways dappled with mid-morning light, that Kyoko began to question me again about the things I’d told her the evening before, the strangeness that was always lurking. ‘When do you, umm, you know, see it?’ ‘It’s usually at night. Or in the early morning.’ I paused and she said nothing, as though she was listening to both what I had said and what I hadn’t said. ‘Which is maybe because I am usually alone then, and vulnerable between waking and sleeping, so it can do its thing, you know, basically it possesses me, or drains me. That’s what it feels like, but it also…ahh…I dunno?’ I stopped and watched her watching me.

12 ‘Have you ever been…?’ She seemed unable to locate the words at first. ‘Has anyone else around you witnessed this being?’ ‘No.’ ‘Not at all?’ Suddenly a memory in smells, feelings and sounds washed over me. ‘Well…once…’ I laughed, recalling some twelve months previously, the smell of ink and paper and microwaved lunches; the constant hum of the air-conditioning system, the echo of the senior project manager Mark Challice’s voice somewhere in the building chastising someone. The Poisoned Chalice — as we’d called him behind his back — had been rolling heads because a large research project, which he had sabotaged from the start with his unrealistic time frames, was behind schedule. I had felt sick to my stomach that day at the thought of being cornered by him. Having entered the photocopy room to hide from him, I found my workmate Victor doing the same thing. Stifling laughs, we’d closed the door behind us and shifted a stationery cupboard to barricade it. Now the real laughing started. We’d staggered about almost drunkenly, clutching each other, tears streaming from our eyes. Victor had worked at the office part-time and from the moment we’d met, he and I had been able to switch effortlessly from seriousness to laughs. He’d called me a crypto fascist because I’d admitted to reading The Fountainhead once, out of curiosity. I’d asked him if he was a shipping heir because of how comfortable he appeared in boat shoes. He’d reminded me that Zambia, where he was from, was landlocked and we’d laughed until everybody else in the office stared at us, at which point we’d relocated to the tea room and laughed even more. He’d also shared with me about his childhood, and how it had been for him when his mother died and he’d been adopted by distant relatives. Not knowing what to say, I’d just listened to his stories, which came in short bursts and with tears, between which he made jokes which spurred me on to make jokes, and that was how we spent our time — laughing and crying together. That afternoon in the copy room, after our laughter had subsided, we’d both sunk wearily to the floor, our arms touching. He’d asked me how I had been and I flopped onto him, letting out a tiny wail of helplessness. He’d put his arm around me softly and asked me why I was always tired; why I seemed to stumble through my life looking bruised beneath the eyes and in a daze. He’d seemed so sincere. After my tears, it had felt natural to show him the insect, beneath the buzzing fluorescent light. All I’d had to do was close my eyes and allow myself to drift into the in-between place and it would just appear, so close was it to me. In his sensitivity, it’d seemed Victor could see it too. The mass of silvery-green limbs, whirring, vibrating. Always shifting, fragmenting, recali- 13 brating. Guttural sounds emanating from its uncertain form. As Victor witnessed this, it was like someone else taking a corner of the grand piano I had been trying to carry up a spiral staircase. But for one reason or another we’d barely crossed paths after this. Perhaps not by coincidence, The Poisoned Chalice had me moved to a different part of the office. Victor and I had tried to organise catching up but I’d repeatedly had to pull out of plans at the last moment due to my sheer exhaustion and its bedfellow, inertia. Some months after the copy room barricade, Victor’s visa had expired and he’d left. I watched Kyoko’s face, bejewelled with light filtering through the grain of her straw hat. While she listened, she dabbed at perspiration on her nose with the corner of a prim lace handkerchief. The sun seared over our heads. ‘So you never saw him again after that?’ She folded the handkerchief and placed it in her pocket. ‘Oh no, I have seen him many times, in my dreams. The good ones, that is.’ It was true, Vic- tor had appeared to me quite regularly in dreaming states, in auras of warm light, permeating my every cell. He would stay with me for the first part of the morning, until waking life would gradually consume the pleasant feelings, and eventually it would seem like the feelings had never existed at all. ‘But I mean, have you seen him in real life?’ she persisted. ‘No! I don’t have Facebook!’ My sarcasm lashed, seemingly without my control. I wasn’t enjoying being questioned. The sun suddenly seemed even brighter in my eyes than before. My face hurt and the skin on my torso itched. ‘And this insect creature and the way it haunts you…do you talk about it with many others?’ Kyoko didn’t seem perturbed by my outburst. ‘No!’ I snapped again, testing how far I could push back. ‘I don’t know if this world de- serves my…my…’ I stammered. ‘Most certainly people would think…’ I stopped, not caring anymore to test her or even to explain. Kyoko must’ve detected this as her tone became softer, less insistent. ‘How about your housemates?’ ‘Bron and Tomas? They know something plagues me. Did you see them, by the way?’ ‘Your housemates?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Yes, while you were making tea, each one came to the doorway…like they were looking for something? But actually, neither of them noticed me.’ 14 ‘Really? I wonder why not.’ I stopped walking and touched the back of my hand to her arm. Her skin felt taut and smooth. Somewhere a gong sounded and I noticed that right where we’d stopped in the laneway, white and yellow flowers of deadly nightshade hung down like gramophone horns, almost grazing our shoulders. ‘Did you turn invisible when you saw Bron and Thomas?’ I pressed her, laughing now. She nodded. My breath caught in surprise. ‘What do you mean?’ She merely shrugged in response and before I could ask again, a cascade of clicks began to sound in my ears. I wanted to stop and listen to them, to see if I could decipher their code, but the rude buzz of a lawnmower starting up nearby drowned them out. We began walking again, soon popping out of the bluestone alleyway onto a suburban street, swollen with middle-class house pride. Its rows of painted letterboxes, shiny brass door-knockers and potted Yucca trees made me nauseous. A jogger in activewear overtook us, the hair at the nape of her neck damp with perspiration. The word ‘napalm’ popped into my head, and then the famous image of the naked South Viet- namese child running. Kyoko interrupted my non-sequitur thoughts. ‘The insects had been following me for quite some time, when another life found me,’ Kyoko commented as we waited to cross the road. ‘The insects follow you too?’ I didn’t hear her response as a truck barrelled past, followed by a stream of cars. I contemplated on her comment about ‘another life.’ It sounded tacky to me, like the name of a computer game played by people who couldn’t handle real life. People like me. I left it dangling, wondering if something had been lost in translation. We crossed the road and continued trudging slackly along streets bleached by sunlight, heat radiating from concrete and asphalt. She stopped to trace a finger along the leaves of a vine which dripped down a timber fence. They were hardy and oblivious to the heat, each leaf. Kyoko seemed fascinated by their tiny veins, which she traced with her fingertips. A hot wind suddenly flared, causing puffs of dust and debris to waft from the gutters. ‘Some wisdom suggests the opportunity to really transform is right in the midst of suffering!’ she said brightly, as we started walking again, now in lockstep. ‘This is right in theory, I’m sure…’ I began, ‘but, I don’t know, Kyoko. Why does anyone have to transform? I just…’ I couldn’t gather the rest of my thoughts before she interrupted their fragments. ‘No-one has to transform, and yet, everyone has to transform…’

15 Her platitudinous remarks gave rise to a row of fridge magnets in my mind: white writing italicised on black backgrounds, sold in staid homewares stores by casual workers wearing ironic eyewear. But once they passed and I relaxed a little, she sounded more oracular than token. ‘Transformation is inevitable,’ she said as I widened my step to avoid treading on some dried dog shit on the footpath. ‘I think right now I just need to get away from everything I know,’ I told her, the mere sniff of leaving suddenly injecting me with a sense of energy which felt narcotic. In fact, it seemed like the only thing that was preventing me from slumping right there on the hot asphalt. ‘And you want to also change your life? Change yourself, right? This insect thing?’ ‘Well…yes…but…I just feel like leaving!’ ‘Leaving on its own will do nothing. Because everywhere you go, you’ll be there, and so will the insect. You have to want it to change.’ ‘Wow, Kyoko. I…I’m… that’s..…ah…hmm…I kind of feel…I don’t…know… if…do you…?’ I continued to make false starts, finally managing to form a question as we neared the beach. ‘Has all this got something to do with the “other life” you mentioned, that you found?’ To the north, the bright flash of a kite-surfer’s acrobatics caught my eye. I glanced at Kyoko to see if she’d noticed it, but she stared straight ahead to the shimmering sea. She had an uncanny ability to seem casual and yet to be in deep concentration at the same time. I was sure, on the other hand, that I had the remarkable knack of presenting as both overly serious and scattered at once. ‘Yes, this does have something to do with the other life I mentioned. If you agree to what I’m about to propose, my estimate is that you will have about a fifty per cent chance of transforming your life. This process that you have the opportunity to be part of will meet you half way. But I’m not making you any other promises.’ I stared at her profile, searching for any hint of irony or trickery, but met only a softness and innocence around her eyes and mouth. She turned to face me front on, and a line from a poem by Baudelaire which I’d studied at school popped into my head: The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist. She smiled and I noticed a tiny flash of silver in the back of her mouth. She had fillings from the time of mercury in dentistry. I wondered if the health trend of re- placing them with porcelain had reached Japan.

16 ‘Fifty per cent sounds like good odds!’ I tried to joke as a chorus of tiny clicks began to sound in my ears, just as they had earlier on our walk. Could she hear them too? I didn’t ask, as they ceased as quickly as they came on. We arrived at the grassy foreshore. Tanned bodies, oiled up and tattooed, hula-hooped and leaped for frisbees. Beers and joints shared in circles of jokes and laughter, dub drifting from the luridly painted camper-vans parked at the perimeter. Contemplating Kyoko’s proposal, I stepped over a pink circle of melted ice-cream, its cone upended at the centre. The bright little spectacle and its rivulets decorated the threshold footpath between the car park and the grassy area. Even though she was no longer around, I could hear the ghost howls of the disappointed child who’d dropped it. ‘Well, okay, Magda,’ Kyoko began. ‘If you were Japanese I’d take your wordlessness as a no, but you’re not. There are a few things then that you’ll need to do, the first of which will sound like a cliché. And this is: you will need to trust me. Not with your intellect. With you realest self.’ I knew what she meant but it sounded unrealistic and pompous. What was my “realest self”, exactly? As we picked a path through the peopled grassy area, it occurred to me that nobody even looked at her, yet some glanced at me as we passed. Perhaps she was invisible again, to everybody but me. I was about to ask her but she cut in quickly, her tone now official. ‘The second thing you will need to do is return to your home and pack a small bag of things that you cannot be without. You mustn’t tell anyone— not your housemates, not anyone — that you are going, except that you will leave a basic note. I have to ask you, do you have any family, or other friends besides your housemates who will miss you in the while that you’re gone?’ I thought first of Tomas and Bron, always stoned. I thought of my father in the suburbs. In my imagination, I told him I was leaving. ‘Okay, just don’t do anything stupid and remember to eat!’ he would reply, looking up for a moment from pruning a shrub. I switched his location in my mind to his desk where he sat surrounded by papers, a pen tucked behind his ear and glasses at the tip of his nose. A photo of my mother taken shortly before she’d died popped into my mind too. In it she looked ethereal, barely of this earth. If I accepted Kyoko’s offer, I would pack it among the things that I could not be without. I wondered for a moment what the word “miss” meant. ‘No-one will miss me,’ I finally declared, feeling very assured of this fact. Kyoko nodded in approval.

17 ‘The note to your housemates should casually say you’ve gone to the desert or the snow. Somewhere vague and inaccessible. We will leave tonight. How is your diet at the moment? Mostly ramen from packets?’ I nodded. ‘Let’s have a swim and then go and eat something decent,’ she suggested. We linked sweaty arms and walked together like boarding school chums all the way down to the water.

I arrived home in the late afternoon to find a note stuck to my door.

Hi Maggie. I’m in the area. Was going to see if you wanted to come to Hélène’s and André’s with me. Call me. Dad

The timing of my father’s visit was not opportune. I scrunched up his note and shoved it in my pocket, and was about to start packing but thought better of it. I dialled my tante’s number. ‘Magda?’ Dad’s voice boomed down the line, inspiring me to hold the receiver away from my ear. ‘Hi Dad. How are you?’ ‘Very well! We’re having ful.’ I had to think quickly of a way to wriggle out of his coded command. ‘We’re having ful’ meant that he, Tante Hélène and Oncle André expected me to join them in their traditional dinner of Egyptian beans. But in the run-up to my new life, I had not the patience for their facile questions and veiled accusations that my failure to be a functioning member of society brought shame upon us all. ‘With hummus and tabouleh?’ I stalled. ‘Of course!’ ‘Sorry, but I can’t come this time…going to dinner with Bron.’ I wasn’t lying. We had a standing arrangement to eat at the environment centre whenever they put on a community meal. ‘Oh, that’s a shame.’ His pause was long enough for several pregnancies. But still, I didn’t justify a thing. ‘And what else is new?’ he finally broke. ‘Are you working?’

18 ‘They haven’t been giving me many shifts since…’ I was going to say since the photocopy room barricade, but recalled that I had never told him about it to begin with. His disappointment in me would’ve almost been harder to take than having barely enough work and money to live on. ‘Since…?’ he inquired suspiciously. ‘Since, ahh, I don’t know…before Christmas?’ ‘Have you asked them about it?’ he pressed me. The truth was, many of my colleagues had also found themselves without work even without barricading themselves in the photocopy room. The work had been steadily evaporating for some time. The Poisoned Chalice gave us no real so- lace, only empty promises about the possibility of more shifts in the future. I told my father as much. I also told him about the graffito, crafted in black marker, that I’d found in the bathroom at work: “PRECARIRAT”, scrawled beside a hasty drawing of a rat chewing on an electricity cable . Then I mentioned that I might go camping with some old friends from university over the coming days. I deliberately kept it vague — something about a convoy, a festival, a possible birthday, a protest, a carnival. At some point in my hazy ramble, luckily, my tante must’ve entered the room, as they began conversing in a mix of Arabic, French and English, something about her vegetable garden and its watering system, while I hung on the other end of the line. After listening for a while, I finally interjected and asked my father to pass on my love to the others and we said goodbye. I couldn’t help but feel sad and guilty for not sharing with my few living relatives what was really going on with me. But I knew my problems were not going to magi- cally resolve by allowing them to interrogate me, or by risking the plan with Kyoko. I was utterly committed at this point to keeping it secret, as she’d advised. This should’ve been easy, as I didn’t even know myself what awaited me. As a chronic over-packer with few possessions of monetary value but quite some of senti- mental import, selecting a small amount of things to take for good was agonisingly difficult. I selected the largest backpack I owned and began to set up small piles of clothing on my bed, sorted by category: underwear, socks, t-shirts, sweatshirts, skirts, shirts, swimming costume, towel. Beside the clothing and toiletries, the miscellaneous: a little stack of books, a babushka doll, a deck of cards, my Cronenberg’s The Fly stubby holder, a jewellery box my father had given me, a couple of old diaries and the photo of my mother. In it, she stood with a frozen smile on a busy street while traffic and people surged around her. She was a young woman who was not dead, just somewhere else, eating a meal or visiting a museum, I would sometimes imagine. Somehow, when I looked at the photo, I could almost forget that she’d taken too many tablets and had driven into an oncoming truck. I could almost forget how much I needed her to be alive and well. My family had let me be- 19 lieve she’d succumbed to an illness, until one day, when I was in high school. I’d doodled a double helix on my homework page and without thinking much about it I’d also scrawled my mother’s name — Leila — inside it, a letter in each of the spaces. I’d been tracing and retracing the letters and shapes, when my father glanced over at my book as he prepared dinner. I watched him fumble with some pots while pretending to ignore the invisible current of discomfort that now charged the air. Taking a breath, he’d turned off the stove, wiped his hands on a tea towel and taken a stool at the bench beside me. He began to tell me that during my early childhood, terrible memories of abuse by her own mother had surfaced for my mother. Dad explained to me that at first, she hadn’t been sure if the memories were real, but then her sister had said the same had happened to her. There’d been nothing he could say to reassure my mother that she wouldn’t somehow destroy her own child — me. I paced beside the bed, stopping to stare at the shapes my belongings formed, as though they could somehow divine my future. There was a knock at my door. I jumped a little, cried out, ‘hang on!’ and hastily threw a blanket over my things. ‘Okay,’ Bron croaked from the other side of the door. ‘Won’t be long!’ I called, repositioning the blanket to look casually strewn rather than con- cealing. ‘Hi!’ I declared and threw open the door to find Bron staring somewhat blankly. I waited it out, matching his silence and watching his eyes. ‘How’s tricks, Puella Æternis?’ he finally spoke, as if remembering that it might be his obligation to do so. He eyed my bed with its blanketed contours and lumps. ‘I’m just tidying up. Spring-cleaning, just a bit of sorting.’ Not for the first time in my life, my nervous over-explaining seemed to provoke more suspicion. He scanned my face, a half-smile playing at his lips. Even though I’d hidden my backpack behind the door, when glancing at the mirrored wardrobe at his own reflection, he’d noticed it. I watched a wrinkle form ever so slightly between his eyes as he contemplated it. Bron knows so much about me, so why not tell him about this? I wondered silently, then reaffirmed Kyoko’s conditions. I couldn’t risk losing the opportunity. And perhaps later, this would open the way for him to receive the same opportunity. And Tomas too. I might be doing this also for them. ‘Got any plans for dinner, Bronislaw?’ I threw a ball of socks at him, attempting sleight of hand. They hit his chest and dropped to the floor. ‘Soupie with the usual gang of idiots. I’m assuming you’re coming?’

20 ‘Sure, man. Shouldn’t speak about our comrades that way, but!’ I joked enthusiastically, perhaps a little too much, drawing on my private excitement at leaving. But he matched my grin with a wide one of his own, which seemed to break through his suspicion and general depression at least for a moment. Our energy bodies twinkled at each other before he shuffled off to make a cup of coffee. I continued sorting and re-sorting piles behind my closed door, feeling slightly guilty now about the extent of my tactical deception. I attempted to distract myself by recollecting Kyoko’s specific instructions. She had told me to pack a single bag and to meet her at the beach at midnight. I was over-complicating the packing. And recalling her words also triggered her request for trust. Up until the moment she had asked for it, I hadn’t much considered if I trusted her or not. But the very question had placed a small maggot in my mind, which birthed a swarm of winged, nagging thought-forms. I could feel them circling me, whispering and buzzing. ‘Do you trust anyone? How can you trust anyone? You aren’t trusting enough. You can’t be trusted to trust.’ The whispers began to turn to louder more insistent voices, with an increasing sense of hysteria. Hoping to banish them, I snatched a book from my shelf by Osho and opened it to a random page.

Move with life with a deep trust. Life has no goal; if you have a goal you are against life. Life moves not like a business, it moves like poetry; life moves not from the head, it moves from the heart – it is a romance. Life is not scientific, it is irrational. Life doesn’t believe in Aristotles and the logicians, it believes in love, in the poets, it believes in the mystics. It is a mystery to be lived, not a riddle to be solved – it is not a puzzle, it is not a problem. The secret is open, only you are closed. It is revealed everywhere: in each tree, in each leaf, in every ray of the sun it is revealed – but you are closed.

I closed the book and groaned softly, pressing my face up against its jacket, trying to disappear into its swirling mustard yellow graphics. He was a fallen mystic and many had felt he’d be- trayed their trust. But Osho had a point; I was closed. At sunset, Bron and I left for the environment centre. Our idle chatter about gnosticism drifted into an idea I’d had to record choirs of insects and to mix these with the sounds of cats purring and monks chanting. He told me of his recent interest in the sounds of maelstroms. This spurred me to mention a paranoid vortex I’d found myself in several days before, the result of shar- 21 ing a strong joint with Tomas. After stubbing it out, he’d wandered off somewhere to tinker with circuit boards and guitars and I’d decided to go to bed, hoping to pass out. Lying flat on my back, at first I’d felt like I was rolling down a hill in a barrel. When that sensation stilled, I’d uncovered a nest of worry glued to a corner of my mind. I’d watched one piece of ‘evidence’ birth another until I'd uncovered a universal conspiracy against life itself. I was the only observer of an anti-life thought-form that had gripped the world in its claws. Behind my cheap Kmart curtain, the insect creature hid, thrumming, reverberating, while I lay frozen. Any moment now, it will strike, I kept telling myself, until merciful sleep took me to its deepest dreamless cave. ‘Shit, Mags!’ Bron replied, his eyes wide with concern. We stopped simultaneously on the street and faced each other. He placed a hand on my shoulder and I felt its warmth through my thin t-shirt. ‘Yeah, fuckin’ jazz cabbage!’ I tsked in camp outrage. We resumed walking in lockstep and discussed the technical aspects of how our sound ideas could work. There were questions I wanted to ask about him and Tomas, about their lives and plans from there on. But every time I was about to, I stopped myself short. I couldn’t help but feel I risked giving myself and my plans away, which might’ve sabotaged the only hope I had of leaping from the stagnant pond that we all floated in. We arrived at the environment centre and after saying hello to some people, we selected a table. Volunteers handed out plates of curry, rice and salad, which we accepted gratefully. ‘What else is on for tonight, Magda?’ Bron inquired, air-drumming a lick with his spoon and dessert fork. ‘Nothing much, Bron,’ I answered a little too quickly, then shot back a deflection: ‘You?’ ‘After this I was thinking about going to see The Shunned Hussies and Undy Trouble play at Mojo’s. Tomas’s new band is playing support. Has he told you what they’re called?’ I shook my head. ‘The Cluster Bees. Strange, ‘cause I would diagnose them all as very much Cluster A. Schizoid as fuck, especially Tom, don’t you reckon?’ I wasn’t sure. ‘But then the pun wouldn’t work. Ahh, whatever. Going to come, Mags? You don’t have to…’ Bron looked around the room, before staring at his curry and poking at it. ‘Nah…I’m real tired…going to head home.’ ‘Fine then, go!’ He flicked his wrist, feigning irritation. I smiled but my mind was elsewhere, lodged on a nagging sensation that there was something significant I was forgetting, some reason why I couldn’t or shouldn’t leave with Kyoko that evening. I rationalised that if it was that I 22 couldn’t, it was to do with being not quite ready. And if it was that I shouldn’t, it was because leaving could be foolish or even dangerous. I pushed my food around on my plate while trying to un- tangle my thoughts. Bron had finished and gone outside at some point, although I’d only barely reg- istered it. After finally finishing my meal, I took my plate up to the kitchen. At the sink, an old friend, Sam, stood washing hers slowly, turning it over and over in her hands. I pulled her from her trance and we embraced, my face momentarily nestling in her thick curly hair. She smelled of rose gerani- um oil and fresh sweat. ‘How have you been?’ we both asked at the same time, pulling our bodies apart, but still holding each other’s hands. Her skin felt soft, too soft for someone living in a beach town on the edge of a desert. ‘I’ve found out how to slow down time,’ she murmured, her expression giving nothing away. I asked her how, while washing my own dish. ‘I told my lover we couldn’t have contact for six months. Each minute of each day crawls like a toddler with no knees. I still check my email multiple times daily in case he’s written, even though I asked him not to.’ We wandered out of the kitchen together, into the main area of the centre. ‘Why did you do it then, if you didn’t really want to?’ I was mesmerised by her story, yet conscious of my own timeline. ‘It is so, so complicated. Have you got time?’ She gestured towards one of the old couches in the corner with large tears in its upholstery, exposing yellow foam. The cheap white clock on the wall above it said it was half past eight. ‘I’m so sorry…I have to go.’ I hugged her close for a moment. Outside in the still night air, Bron stood beside the vegetable garden smoking a cigarette while a Dutch-sounding person delivered a monologue about the agricultural industry or ‘big farm- a,’as he said he liked to call it, spelling out the pun. He smiled broadly with large square teeth, exuding a kind of positivity, even though what he was talking about was apocalyptic, from the brief phrases I apprehended. I picked a sprig of basil and brought it to my nose while examining some tomatoes which had withered in the heat. Crickets sang loudly and I shivered although I wasn’t cold. Bron cleared his throat and I looked up, somehow knowing I was being summoned to save him. I tipped my head towards the exit gate, indicating ‘let’s go.’ Bron lifted his arms towards the

23 Dutch fellow in a show of helplessness and we exited together. I reflected on what Sam had told me. ‘I’m scrubbing “white peoples’ problems” from my lexicon,’ I started. ‘Either that, or I am devoting the rest of my life to helping all people. I can’t take it anymore. It’s not just my guilt for whinging about petty shit when much of the world is dealing with basic survival. It’s the way I judge people for whinging about petty shit. I have compassion too, I truly do. But it has to fight with this really judge-y part of me. The part that insists “we have it pretty good so shut the fuck up!” No, not “shut the fuck up!” “Try and help!” Do you know what I mean? I sometimes get sick of the doing-nothing.’ I completed my monologue with running my hands in opposite directions along an invisible horizon. ‘Mags, double, no, triple-think much? I really can’t be bothered with this conversation, actually. You’re really dipping to new lows in the boring conversation and virtue-signalling stakes. It was bad enough that I had to sit through that agricultural doco, then hear that clog wog drone on about it after. I should’ve told him about my idea…you know, artificially intelligent tofu that runs around so people can hunt it and gorge on it guiltlessly? But I couldn’t be fucked. And now you’re starting with your liberal guilt, and your snowflake warrior helping shit!’ I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. His serious/not serious rants seemed deliberately confusing sometimes. ‘Hey! Virtue-signalling? You been on the fascist forums again? Who’s the fucking identitarian snowflake? Anyway, at least I am being a bit reflexive and…’ I broke off and we were both silent until the urge came again to call him out. ‘You’re a bit of a conversation Nazi, as well as an actual Nazi, you know that, don’t you?’ ‘Mags, sorry, I can’t care,’ Bron snapped. ‘I’ve gotta get to the chemist before I head out to Tom’s gig.’ He embraced me. Our sternums crashed together, our hearts meeting momentarily. I felt his black t-shirt soft and threadbare in my fingers. He pulled away and strode towards the main street, leaving me standing beneath a streetlight like a character in a musical, concluding that he was in fact in a bad mood. I watched a cloud of gnats congregating and circling in the light and stuck my middle finger up at his back as he disappeared around a corner. He’d made it so easy. As I made my passage home, I began to wonder if I had unconsciously orchestrated the abruptness of his departure by raising a subject I knew he would find facile. Farewell Bronislaw, I whispered to the night sky, finding a new ease in my shoulders despite the heavy weight that dragged upon my heart.

24 Once home, I finalised my packing, questioning constantly if leaving with Kyoko was a good idea. Right up until five minutes to midnight, as I neared the beach, I was still vacillating about it. Outside the toilet block where we’d first met, I turned slowly in a circle, looking for any sign of her. I imagined I heard her voice, ‘we’ll meet at the beach at midnight,’ but it was only the wind. I hefted my bag along the path between the dunes and down to the foreshore, my footsteps squeaking through powdery whiteness illuminated by moonlight. I trudged down to where the tide decorated the shore with a foamy necklace. Glancing back towards the dunes, there was still no sign of her. Then suddenly she was beside me. Her casual image was gone, replaced by an immaculate, classic look: jeans, shiny black riding boots and bone-coloured trench coat, her hair pulled back into a low pony tail. I extended my arms to embrace her. ‘No time.’ She shook her head. I dropped my arms back down, embarrassed. She took a small white envelope from her bag and offered it to me. It had my first name on it, written in a neat hand. I turned it over and was about to tear it open, when she commanded me to wait. ‘Don’t open it yet! Sorry — you must wait in silence for a few moments, and then make an intention, before you open!’ I knew what she meant as I’d read about intentions in my forays into esoteric and new age texts. But I didn’t fully understand why I needed to, before opening an envelope. It was confusing. Nevertheless we stood together quietly for several minutes, until she nodded at me. I took this to mean it was time to voice my intention. ‘It is to know when to trust and when not to trust.’ At this, Kyoko smiled and bowed ever so slightly. ‘And to become who I really am,’ I added. She was silent for a few moments, perhaps to be sure that I had completely finished speaking my intention. ‘Now you may open,’ she finally spoke. I did as she suggested and slid my finger along the envelope’s seal. Inside was a piece of paper with the exact words of my intention written on it, letter for letter. I could hardly speak. ‘Who…who…wrote this??’ I stammered, looking all around for a magician to appear. ‘I can’t tell you Magda-chan. But I can say, we are very lucky. Now, iki-mashou. Let’s go!’ I followed Kyoko back up through the dunes, towards the car park. My head felt clear, as though it had been washed inside by a high powered hose and bleached by the brightest sunlight. I looked up at the sky as we reached the car park. The stars appeared brighter, closer somehow. 25 I was marvelling at the beauty of the night sky when a black car with mirrored windows pulled up alongside us. Kyoko slid into the backseat and ushered me in beside her. I threw my bag into the boot and climbed inside, greeting the driver and running my hand along the smooth new- smelling leather upholstery. Kyoko said some words to him in Japanese and the driver hit the pedal. The traffic was minimal on the highway which ran alongside the river. I wasn’t accustomed to being in new cars and noticed how the wheels rolled so effortlessly along the road, as though at one with it. I didn’t even care where we were going at this point, I felt so relaxed. I glanced at Kyoko. She alternated between reading from the screen of her phone to thumb- ing messages into it, streetlights glimmering on the sheen of her hair. We passed several signs indicating we were headed to the airport. Knowing I had only thirty-three dollars in my bank account, I mused that this would not be enough for even a mystery flight, but I felt no need to mention this to the others in the car. Occasionally I noticed a bright flash of shining wings and antennae, both inside the car and out. The creature was there, following me. As usual, it made me uneasy, but I told myself that soon things would change; soon things would be better. The turn-off for the airport ap- proached but we didn’t take it, continuing along the highway instead. I watched Kyoko peripherally without saying anything. She looked up from her phone, answering my unspoken question.‘We are not going there.’ ‘Where are we going?’ ‘We are going to take a plane, but from somewhere else.’ After about another twenty minutes, we turned off the highway and onto a much darker, nar- rower road. We continued along it until some lights appeared ahead. I noticed several runways and small towers lit up. It suddenly occurred to me that although I had packed my passport, I had no idea if it was still current. For the first time during the car journey, my stomach began to churn with worry. I shifted around in my seat, trying to remember, trying to think. At the very least, this possibility that I might not be able to fly cleared any remaining ambivalence: I realised I truly did want to fly. ‘What is it, Magda?’ Again Kyoko demonstrated her telepathy. ‘I don’t know if my passport is current! I packed it but…yeah, not sure...’ I trailed off, feeling stupid. ‘Oh no!’ She closed her eyes and massaged her eyelids with the tips of her thumb and forefinger, breathing slowly. ‘I knew there was something.’ I picked at a fingernail, trying to remember when I had applied for the passport. Kyoko opened her eyes and spoke some nervous sounding words to the driver, staccato in her delivery. He 26 slowed the car and pulled up in front of the main building, our vehicle one of only four that I could see. I realised it had been almost ten years since my last trip overseas. If the passport was out of date, it would only be by a matter of weeks or months at the most. The car had barely stopped moving when Kyoko jumped from it. I followed her. She opened the boot and threw my backpack at me. I somehow caught it and put it on the ground. While unzipping it, my throat was constricting at the possibility that the plan was coming undone. I had placed the passport in a large envelope along with my birth certificate and the photo of my mother. I tore open the envelope, barely aware that the photo of my mother fluttered to the ground. After three attempts at flicking through the passport I still wasn’t able to locate the identification page. I stood with shaking hands, about to hand it to Kyoko to see if she could find it, when it sprang into view. ‘It’s fine! It’s up to date, Magda Zabelle Levy, you expire next year!’ Kyoko had sidled up to me to read the details at the same moment I had. Our eyes found each other, tremendous relief flowing between them, which felt strange as I had no real idea of what my future held, or of what Kyoko’s motives were. Was I something to do with the oddities she collected? Trust. Osho’s words came back. Why? I replied, looking up at the sky. A satellite crawled along indifferently. Kyoko bent over to pick something up and I realised it was the photo of my mother. She handed it to me and I tucked it back in my bag. We stood on the little road for a while and made some jokes, perhaps to calm ourselves or to remember that we were in it together, whatever “it” was. After the jokes had worn themselves out, a small space opened. Neither of us spoke. In that space, a question presented itself. If it had form, it would’ve been a fish hook doused in petrol. I lit it and asked, ‘Where are we going, Kyoko? It’s time you told me.’ ‘Fair enough, Magda. I thought you would’ve guessed. We are going to Japan. But not via the usual channels.’

Despite my excitement and the noise of the engine, I managed to fall asleep as soon as the tiny jet’s wheels left the ground. I dreamed first of a flickering light. I was with Bron in an impossible room, both walled and open. His forehead was against mine at first tenderly, then he was shouting words I couldn’t comprehend, his voice repetitive and shrill as a siren. Next, we were in a large room where people were lining up to be ground into sausage meat. I woke as my tray was being lowered by a flight attendant whose name tag said Murray. He placed a plate before me with a red Frankfurt on it and a small heap of sauerkraut beside it. I was 27 intrigued both by the sausage and by Murray. Had his parents named him so? He didn’t look to me like he had always been a Murray. I asked him. ‘No,’ he answered with a coy smile. ‘I named myself.’ I turned to look at Kyoko, who slept in her seat across the aisle, making tiny sporadic snores. As if sensing my attention, she woke. She and Murray exchanged a look that I couldn’t decipher and he disappeared again behind a pale blue curtain towards the front of the plane. ‘I had a very peculiar dream,’ I announced. Kyoko smiled. I looked down at my hand and it was dripping like a candle onto my plate. Waxy puddles of skin were forming beside the sausage, like a sauce. ‘Try not to get mixed up with it,’ she warned gently. Was she seeing what I was seeing? I couldn’t be sure, but I watched as my candle-hand dissipated, leaving my normal hand in its place. ‘You can eat this though!’ she laughed, pointing at the sausage. I shook my head almost violently. Still chuckling, she assured me it was organic and vege- tarian, made from tempeh and no chemicals. But my dream was very present. I could still hear the grinding up of bodies, the snapping and crushing of bones and the squelching of flesh. ‘How long until we get there?’ I asked, like a child on a family vacation. She checked her watch. ‘About another three hours.’ I watched her fall asleep almost instantly, her head flopping forward. I wanted to know where exactly we were going, but reasoned that it would make little difference at the present stage. A particular prefecture was not really going to break the deal for me, despite the nuclear radiation being higher in certain parts of the country. I knew that Kyoko had her own concerns about this. I mainly hoped I wouldn’t be cold. I pulled my jacket around me and tried again to sleep.

Trailing behind Kyoko, I lugged my backpack along the tarmac. Once inside the small airport building, a group of officials greeted us, directing us towards a bench where we were to lay out our bags to be checked. After unzipping my bag and sifting through my things, one of the officials picked up my Cronenberg’s The Fly stubby holder and turned it over several times in her hands. She seemed especially captivated by the image of Jeffrey Goldblum as Brundle/Fly, his intense bug-eyed face 28 born anew into hybridity. After placing the stubby holder back in the bag, she took a very long look at me. ‘I’m not getting any younger,’ I said, quoting Veronica, Brundle/Fly’s lover. Kyoko stepped hard on my toe. I almost screamed but stifled it. After the checks were complete and a brief exchange in Japanese uttered between Kyoko and the official, she wheeled her suitcase out of the customs area and I followed, my pack on my back. In the small airport lobby stood a single person. She wore a suit and held a sign which had my first name written on it and something else written in Japanese, which I guessed was Kyoko’s name. Given that we were the only people who’d recently arrived and that this suited person was the only person waiting for passengers, it seemed very odd to me that she held up the sign. ‘What is she doing?’ I laughed and elbowed Kyoko. ‘We Japanese can be very official.’ I couldn’t tell if her reply was defensive, wry or factual, or all three. We walked over to where the woman stood. Kyoto spoke some quiet words to her and bowed. The woman bowed back. Then Kyoko bowed again. And the woman bowed back. I was wondering how long this bowing exchange would continue, when Kyoko introduced the woman to me as Kanda-san. Her face broke into a map of tiny lines beneath a pancake of pale makeup. But just as quickly as her face cracked, it healed up again into a blank mask. She turned efficiently on leather court shoes and we frog- marched behind her to a waiting vehicle. It was another impeccable, new car which glided along the road. We drove in silence beside rice paddies as the sky darkened and a light drizzle decorated the windows. Kanda-san put the windscreen wipers on and finally spoke in Japanese to Kyoko. ‘She wants to know if you would like the radio on?’ Kyoko translated, twisting herself in the front seat to look at me. ‘Oh, yes, I suppose? Some music might be nice?’ The two of them exchanged some more words. ‘She wants to know if you would like to listen to an English show on an international radio station?’ ‘I’d probably rather music,’ I replied and the two women conferred again. ‘She said the English show is very informative,’ Kyoko’s smile seemed ever so slightly tense.

29 ‘Okay, then. I suppose we can never have enough English information,’ I replied, but it didn’t appear they’d enjoyed my sarcasm or even apprehended it. Kanda-san fiddled with the dial and after a few crackles, a voice sprang from the speakers: ‘The Tea Leaf Jar with moon and plum tree design in overglaze enamels was made by the studio of Ninsei in the seventeenth century. It bears a richly colourful design with the blossoms depicted in red and silver and the trunk and branches, mainly in green and purple…’ I tuned out. It wasn’t that I was not interested in ceramic art from the Edo period. I was just a little overwhelmed.

Kyoko told me some minutes later that we were on one of the main islands of the archipelago. ‘Shikoku.’ She made it sound like a breeze whispering through a bamboo grove. We turned off the highway and onto a dirt road, along which we bumped for at least ten minutes before coming to some wrought iron gates and a driveway which snaked towards a farmhouse. The house struck me as having the features of a traditional Japanese building, with its voluptuous thatched roof and screen-like panels on the front. Set against lush rice fields and the moody sky, the scene stole my breath. By the time we unpacked the car and Kanda-san begun to show us around inside, my tired- ness had me shuffling after the two women down the main corridor of the house. Despite the beauty of the house’s exterior, there was something about its inner space which made me feel drained and uneasy. We came to my room and I noticed a heavy incense smell permeating the space. While Kanda-san rattled off some kind of lengthy explanation to Kyoko, I gazed out the window at the elegantly landscaped agricultural land, imagining a walk and breaths of country air. After sneezing twice, I was just about to mention my wish to step outside, when Kanda-san spoke . ‘Would you like to… a bath?’ Her English was halting, her smile stiff. ‘Thank you! Maybe later on…I…’ I raised my thumb and pointed towards the front of the house, by way of warning them that I would soon step outside again. But Kyoko cut me off. ‘Magda, Kanda-san means for you to take a bath now. I believe she has kept one warm for you.’ I looked from one to the other of the two women, trying to understand the dynamic between them. Was Kanda-san some kind of controlling dotard whom Kyoko needed to defer to out of 30 obligation, now we were in her home? Or was Kyoko the one in control, and Kanda-san merely her lackey? I couldn’t reach a conclusion. Nor had I the energy to resist their demands. Once she’d removed the bath’s cover, Kanda-san crouched on the floor and began to utter a stream of words that I couldn't understand, all the while gesturing at the water and the taps. At some point she stopped and looked around, as if expecting Kyoko to suddenly materialise and translate. I attempted to mime Kyoko’s ducking off into her own room as we’d made our way towards the bathroom. Realising this was failing, I simply pointed towards Kyoko’s room. Kanda-san nodded at me, her lips pursed almost comically. ‘Okay, you can get out now,’ I muttered under my breath. And as though she understood what I had said, she stood and taking little steps, backed out of the room, bowing all the way. I reluctantly bowed too, more than a bit annoyed with Kyoko for leaving me in such an awkward situation. With the rice paper screen closed, I dropped my clothes to the tiled floor and stepped into the bath. At first, the hot water soothed me. But as it cooled, I began to feel less comfortable and turned a critical eye to the austerity of the bathroom. Its single bar of vegetable soap and slate floor was impressive in one way, but strangely oppressive in another. The space felt like some kind of contrived void. Even worse, the longer I stayed in the tepid water, the more I realised that the room was pregnant with an unseen presence sucking at my energy. Or was it all in my mind? Trying to work it out was the most exhausting of all. After I dried and dressed myself, I returned to my room and noticed a painting hanging on the wall. It was of a dragonfly and an orchid, monochrome, done in ink. I brought my face up close to it, to inspect its fine brush strokes. Its very simple lines somehow conveyed a great deal of movement. I felt for a moment as if the insect could fly right off the rice paper, into my room. “Are you alive?” I asked it out loud. The ink drawing did not respond. Flopping onto my futon and rolling onto my side, I spied a tray on the floor between the bed and the window. On it was a bowl of rice, some miso soup, pickled vegetables on a plate and a pot of tea. I surmised that Kanda-san must’ve left them for me. Seated at the edge of my bed, I ate everything quickly, delighting in the saltiness and bitterness of the soup and pickles and the way all of it slaked my hunger and thirst. After that, I went to sleep.

31 Wandering out of my room the following morning, I almost collided with Kyoko, who was striding down the hall at a swift clip. She was dressed in a beige tailored suit with a crisp white shirt. Her eyes were bright, her posture upright and strong, as though a rod ran up her spine. Slouching in my robe, I played with my thistledown hair and thought about the clothing I’d packed for the trip. I’d only been able to choose from things which were appropriate for the beach town I’d been living in, all procured from various second-hand shops and flea markets. The only formal piece that I’d brought was a dress that I’d worn to several weddings many years previously. It was a cocktail dress the colour of faded lime with a bronze tint. Knee-length, pencil fitting with three-quarter length sleeves, it was the loveliest item of clothing that I’d ever owned. I wondered if I ought to have gone straight to my room and dressed in it, but it really seemed senseless when we were on a rice farm and I really had no idea what I had come to Japan for, except that Kyoko had enticed me with the promise that my life would change. That was really all I knew. ‘Magda, ohayo gozaimasu. How did you sleep?’ Kyoko asked, and was suddenly very still, as though she had completely forgotten the hurry she’d been in. ‘I slept well, I think, Kyoko.’ Although what I’d said was true, I smiled falsely as I didn’t want to deal with the consequences of letting her know that in that moment, my thoughts were clogged with doubt and I was beginning to resent her for knowing more about what my future held than I did. It gave her an incredible power over me and although I did have some trust in her, the imbalance was making me nervous. But these were not concerns that I had the confidence to voice, nor the energy to defend. ‘Good to hear! You will need your energy!’ she declared, as though she had read the last part of my thoughts. ‘Now, let’s have some breakfast and we can also discuss the next stage. A part of the journey has been made but there is more to come. At some point I’ll need to tell you a little of the history of this island. Or maybe you already know something about Shikoku?’ ‘I was going to look it up, but my phone…’ I trailed off. My battery had gone flat, but thoughts of earthed and unearthed electricity and voltages had to compete with my rumbling belly. ‘Let’s go and enjoy the food that Kanda-san has prepared for us. We have many things to prepare and discuss. We’ll sort out your phone too, don’t worry!’ She winked at me. I assumed my hunger was audible, as it had been the evening we first met at the beach. Down the hallway, Kyoko slid open another rice paper door onto a small dining room. In its centre was a low wooden table with dark green cushions at its feet. We each chose a cushion and sat opposite one another while Kanda-san began to bring out small square earthenware plates and lac- quer bowls of steaming food items. She placed them all in symmetrical, equilateral alignment to the 32 table’s edges. I was astonished at the level of perfectionism and felt like moving them around just to see what would happen. ‘Iitadakimasu! Kyoko announced. ‘Please, let’s eat.’ I made some attempts to emulate Kyoko’s delicate eating style, but my appetite, like a way- ward mare, hurdled all boundaries of good manners. Eventually, I realised that Kyoko was looking at me and laughing behind her hand. ‘This is not very Japanese of me, I guess, Kyoko.’ I spoke through a mouthful of rice. The moment we finished the meal and placed our chopsticks and napkins down, Kanda-san appeared and removed everything from the table with a tray. Then she returned with a teapot and replenished our cups. Every time she entered the room, I felt my shoulders tense. ‘Is she spying on us?’ I was joking, but also not joking. ‘Don’t worry about her. She just has a very strong work ethic. Besides, there are more important things to discuss.’ Kyoko took a sip of tea and dabbed at the edges of her lips with a napkin before continuing. ‘There are many myths and legends about Shikoku Island. Some refer to it as “Death Island” partly because one of the meanings of “shi” is death. But “shi” can also mean “four” and Shikoku is made up of four provinces. There is a pilgrimage of eighty-eight temples that many people do when they know they are soon to die.’ I followed her eyes to the window. Outside, a doberman that I hadn’t seen before bounded up the gravel driveway, its insistent bark heralding the arrival of a small red car. ‘Daisuke’s here,’ Kyoko announced with a mysterious sort of smile. ‘He’s going to tell us more of what we need to know for now. Perhaps he’ll even join us for some tea and some conversation.’ ‘Oh, so you don’t know everything?’ I muttered under my breath as the car pulled up in front of the house. Kyoko ignored me and we watched Daisuke climb out of the car and slam its door behind him. As he walked towards the house, I could see he had on a pair of shiny silver com- bat-style boots which flashed and shone as he walked. Kyoko and I continued to watch through the window as Daisuke carried what appeared to be a suit bag around to the front door. We heard Kanda-san greet him and several moments later he was in the dining room with us, exchanging bows with Kyoko, who’d stood to greet him. I was disappointed not to be able to inspect Daisuke’s silver boots closer up but reasoned he’d removed them at the door, as was the lo-

33 cal custom. He and Kyoko stood side by side, chatting softly to one another while looking at me. I pretended they weren’t and drank my tea nonchalantly. Once seated at the table, Daisuke offered me his hand and I shook it. Instantly my senses felt flooded by the loveliness of his grasp. We held each other’s hands for the tiniest moment too long. He began speaking in English, like Kyoko, almost flawlessly. ‘Welcome to Japan, Magda. My name is Daisuke Ando. How has your time in Japan been so far?’ ‘Thank you, Daisuke. It’s been fine so far. I’ve only really been in this house. I don’t really know why I’m here. I don’t know that anything feels quite real, to be honest.’ I thought again about what Kyoko had said when we’d first met, about her business of collecting oddities. Was I one? Was he? I wondered while we chatted idly for a little time about the farm, the weather, Japan, my home town. None of it captivated me as much as he himself did. He was so serious, but there was something else about his presence; a little star in his eye and a secret ridiculousness. I had the tiniest mental flash of him breaking out into a silly dance. The silver boots had planted that seed. After the chit chat he said something that seemed relevant to why I was there. ‘So, Kyoko has told me about you. She said she shared with you about some of the possibilities of our work. From the sounds of it, you are well-matched with what we do.’ A smile stretched broadly across his face, revealing a dimpled cheek and an overbite, one of his front incisors slightly crossed over the other. Smiling back at him, I suddenly became conscious of my own teeth and the fact that I hadn’t brushed them for a few days. The urge to excuse myself and find my toothbrush and toothpaste to scrub my teeth was even more pressing than my need to hear what he had to say. ‘Will you excuse me please?’ I stood before waiting for their answer. Sidling from the room, I broke into a run down the hallway. Once in my bedroom, I plunged my hands into my backpack and rifled through my possession, recalling Kyoko’s and Daisuke’s baffled expressions as I had dashed away. Oddly, this image tickled me. I began furiously brushing my teeth in the bathroom, musing that the two of them might’ve thought I’d taken ill or that I was trying to hide an emotional outburst. Really, either were possible at this point. Anything seemed possible given that in the space of forty-eight hours, I’d been invited to begin a new life and had been spirited away on a private jet to Japan, without being advised of what that new life would entail. Still scrubbing my teeth, but more slowly now, I wondered why it was that along with my private delight in Daisuke, I was also intimidated by the notion of infinite possibility. Weren’t peo- 34 ple supposed to be excited by it? Instead, I felt swollen with it, as though it was the side-effect of an illness. I tried to distract myself from my panic by immersing myself instead in some of the things I’d heard about Japan and wanted to experience: rare delicacies, strange museums, traditional dances, art noise bands, tea ceremonies, youth subcultures, Fuji-san, hot springs and bathing apes. Spitting out the last of my toothpaste and rinsing my mouth, I resolved to ask Kyoko and Daisuke about when and how I could find these things. When I returned to the dining room however, they were not there. The teacups and teapot had vanished. On the table was a note written in small, pretty handwriting.

Please go into your room and change into the garments on the bed.

I stood at the dining room window, my forehead pressed to the glass, and watched Daisuke’s car disappear up the driveway, again chased by the doberman and serenaded by its barks. I rolled my eyes and closed them tightly for a few moments. Snapping them back open and refocusing my gaze, I strode out of the dining room and down the hallway to the front door. I tried the door-knob but it seemed to be deadlocked. Sensing something behind me and expecting it to be the insect, I spun around to find Kanda-san close enough to me that I could see her chest rise and fall with her breath and some dried spittle at the corner of her mouth. In one hand she carried a plastic watering can and in the other, a pair of secateurs with heavy steel arms. For the first time I noticed her frame was quite large, her build broad shouldered and narrow hipped. Despite her years, perhaps sixty- five or seventy, she was still sinewy and strong. She gripped the secateurs and maintained deadpan eye contact, almost a parody with her painted-on smile and snaggle teeth. Squeezing past her, I gestured up the hallway with my thumb and muttered ‘my room.’ I hadn’t meant for her to follow, but of course she did. Still, I reached the door with enough time to quickly close it in her face, my heart pounding in my ears. Did she just threaten me with the secateurs and the watering can? I wondered. Why did they leave me with her? On my bed lay a black vinyl suit bag, which I recognised as the one Daisuke had carried in from his car. I unzipped it and eased out a white robe on one coat hanger and some loose white trousers on another. Also in the suit bag at the bottom was a conical straw hat and inside that was a folded green silk scarf. I traced my fingers along the woven straw of the hat and brought the scarf to my nose. It was pungent with the smell of naphthalene. Remembering Kanda-san and how much I wanted to be away from her, I quickly put on the white cotton trousers and lightweight robe which fell to my upper thighs, hoping the act of dressing 35 would precipitate my departure from the farmhouse. I wasn’t sure what to do with the green silk scarf, so I donned it like a beauty pageant sash, over my shoulder and under the other arm. Next, I placed the straw hat on my head. There were no mirrors in which to check my appearance; the spar- tan design of the place seeming to allow for only minimal vanity. I mused to myself that Kanda-san must’ve applied makeup to her hatchet face in the reflection of a steel milk bucket. I dropped the straw hat on the futon at the same instant that I heard the doberman barking and the sound of another car in the driveway. It occurred to me in a single moment: they were sending me on the walk around the island. Preparing me for death. My knees suddenly weak, I sank onto the futon and hugged them to my chest. I was shuddering and about to cry when someone tapped at my door. ‘Come in,’ I called, sobered. Perhaps walking the island would be good for me, I tried to tell myself. I just had to try not to die. Hoping to see Daisuke in the doorway, I was disappointed that it was Kanda-san, but was mildly comforted that at least this time her gnarly hands were empty of gardening tools. I watched her eyes scan the room and land on my clothes in a pile on the floor. ‘Sorry, the bag, you pack and close,’ she ordered. There could be no direct gain for me in resisting her. Doing so could only be a brief salvo, a last ditch attempt at rescuing my battered morale. ‘Sorry/not sorry,’ I grumbled and stuffed my belongings into my bag. Next she marched me out the house. Instead of Daisuke’s red car as I’d expected and hoped to see, a slender white van was parked in the driveway. In the driver’s seat sat a solemn-looking older man wearing a black porkpie hat with a bright green feather tucked into its band. He and Kanda-san spoke several words through his open window, while the doberman danced around us, stopping only to sniff me. After I’d turned away from the dog’s attentions several times, Kanda-san opened the van for me. I slammed the door shut in her face, glad to have the opportunity to do that to her once again. The driver turned to me with a gold-toothed smile before driving us away the farm house. The dog farewelled us with yips and barks while I looked out of the window at terraced rice paddies. At one point, turning back to the farmhouse, I noticed a little wisp of smoke coming from a chimney on the roof and realised that not once had I seen a fire there. The driver spoke no words, just smoked and tapped the steering wheel occasionally in time to the jazz playing through the stereo. I couldn’t hold onto any one particular thought or feeling for

36 too long. The centreless music worked itself through the car and across the rice fields, as if weaving everything together. After an hour or so on the road, I noticed the rice paddies thinning out and the land becoming mountainous. Before long, we were traveling more slowly along the undulating streets of a village of tiny dwellings and delicate gardens. Finally, the driver in the porkpie hat pulled off the road and parked at the base of an enormous tree. Leaving me with no doubt as to what he expected of me, the driver walked around to my door, slid it open and grabbed my backpack from the seat. I jumped out of the van and took my bag from him, slinging it onto my back. He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a folded envelope with my name on it and handed it to me. ‘Arigatou,’ I mumbled, taking it from him. He smiled gently before turning towards the van and opening the driver’s side door. ‘Wait!’ I cried, not in any way prepared to be left alone like that. ‘Open!’ he commanded over his shoulder and pointed to the envelope. By the time I’d torn open the envelope, he was in the driver’s seat, starting the ignition. I was about to charge over to him and demand that he drive me to where Kyoko was, when he swung the van back out onto the road and disappeared around a bend. I yelled an expletive before dropping my bag and squatting beside it. Lower to the ground, somehow I felt better, as though amongst the dirt, ants and worms, I would have a better chance of determining my own fate. It didn’t make sense, but nothing else did. I began to sort through the contents of the envelope. Inside was a topographic map with English references, a handwritten note and a small wad of cash. I had no idea what the exchange rate was but I counted 44,000 Yen. I slipped the money back into the torn envelope and placed it in the front pocket of my backpack. Next, I read the note.

Magda, your initiation now involves Ohenro, the pilgrimage of eighty-eight Buddhist temples. We do not require that you visit all of them. Please just do your best. Enclosed is a map which has been marked out for your passage. We will be waiting for you at the end. Work hard and go well.

It was written in the same neat hand as the previous notes. I wondered if I should save all of them, if they would stand up as evidence in a court of law. I imagined a court case with a lawyer presenting my white garb as exhibits.

37 I felt better at least knowing now why I was wearing the ceremonial clothes. I also realised that I had left the conical straw hat back at Kanda-san’s farmhouse. I smiled about my accidental defiance, and hoped that in some way this would mean I was bucking the dogma of the ceremony. Yet on second thought, it seemed like such a small and pointless victory and one which I would probably regret if the weather turned sunny. I pulled the hood of my coat onto my head and studied the map. Several people cycled past me in flashes of colour and steel spokes. Time to move, to try to find some shops. I walked into the town feeling glum, until a realisation took me by the hand : if I really wanted the situation I was in to end, the opportunity had arrived. I could borrow a telephone from someone in a shop and ring the embassy, telling a story of coercion, kidnapping and being held cap- tive by a person armed with secateurs and a watering can. I ruminated over this while opening the door to a small grocery shop. My entry triggered a bell and a woman at the counter with a rasping voice uttered a singsong greeting. Wandering the shop’s aisles, I inspected packets of dried fish, nuts, salted plums, ramen and rice biscuits. Turning them over in my hands, I sniffed the packets. Of course, my need for familiarity drew me to the ramen, but something else, a wiser impulse, directed me to select a variety of food items. I perused the refrigerator’s neat arrangements of fermented beans, rice balls, tofu and brightly coloured pickled vegetables. The sense of caring order with which the food had been set out on the shelves had the effect of softening my panic and calming my senses. I selected a few more items and took them to the counter. Despite her obvious cataracts, the elderly woman managed to tally my purchases and wrote down on a piece of paper the numerals ‘619’ with the Yen symbol beside them. I studied the curren- cy I’d been given for a few moments, paid her and packed all my purchases into my backpack. As I turned to leave, she uttered a seemingly complex sentence in Japanese well beyond the basic words that I knew. I nodded at her and smiled, thinking I must’ve seemed wretched. Wandering back to where I had been dropped off, it occurred to me that I had no real idea of where I would stay during the nights of my pilgrimage. The weather was cool, and I was in no way equipped to sleep outdoors. I wondered if I would be able to find a small inn or hostel for a low fee, at least for the first night. I knelt at the generous roots of the enormous tree for a moment, examining my map. It appeared that I needed to walk thirteen kilometres to reach the first temple, named Kakurinji, which translated as Crane Forest Temple. I truly believed that I could achieve this distance before nightfall. But as I began to walk, I soon realised the mountain I had to climb to reach the temple was incredibly steep. I saw no other 38 pilgrims at all and even though I studied the map repeatedly, I began to question my ability to read it. Despite the frigidity of the air and the ground, my body soon became warm and damp with perspiration. I tore off my coat and used the smelly green sash to wipe sweat from my face, all the while hiking up the rugged path. To try to override my mind’s resistance, I began to repeat an old rhyme to the rhythm of my footfalls.

‘Left, left, left, right left! Left, left, left, right, left! I left my wife in New Orleans with forty-five cents and a can of beans ‘Cause I thought it was right, right, Right for my country whoopsie doo! Left, left, left, right, left!’

Eventually, I began to run out of puff and the rhyme started annoying me. But my thoughts, without the sense of order it gave them, grew wilder and more disturbing the higher I climbed. Vi- sions of hurling myself over the edges of ravines or off bridges into the mouths of wild lions or the paths of road trains began to plague me. So I returned to the left-right rhyme, again as distraction. But then the rhyme itself became confluent with warped and menacing imagery in my mind's eye: a woman who resembled the worker at the grocery store where I’d shopped earlier was abandoned by the side of the road. She was panhandling and her fingers bled from being cut by the bean can lid she held. Each time I’d say the verse, her fingers would grow bloodier, her nose longer, her teeth yellower, her hair gradually becoming matted straw. She came to look more and more like a wild, unkempt version of Kanda-san. The last time I uttered it, I stopped in the middle because this crone in my imagination had begun throwing rusted can lids like ninja stars, their jagged edges lodging in the foreheads of passersby. The vision was perversely amusing for a moment, but too disturbing for me to allow it to continue. I wondered where it had come from. Had it been conjured by other beings who hid in the mountains and in the hollows of trees? I craned my neck to look up at the pointed tops of the cedars and pines, but they bore no answers, only shrouds of mist. Dogged now in my upwards trek, I was determined to notice only my footfalls on the packed earth. The crone and her caper had dissolved from my peripheral vision, while the energy of the earth beneath my feet carried me along with its stolid generosity.

39 Occasionally, rustling sounds in the verdant undergrowth startled me. I sifted through all of my knowledge of Japanese wildlife. I mused that apes, deer, pandas and foxes were engaging in a multi-species salon, only a fraction beyond what my senses could perceive. While all of this was going on, with each step I took up the mountain, I was also becoming angrier and angrier with Kyoko. Was she some kind of sadist? I really had to consider that. The mysterious and secretive games that she had played with me, to torment me or recruit me, or whatever it was she was up to, struck me as a reflection on her character. It occurred to me that for all her compassion, she had the capacity to be quite manipulative. Guilt for doubting her chased up these thoughts, as she had surely made sacrifices in order for me to be there, and perhaps she genuinely believed it would be helpful for me. After several hours hiking and wading repeatedly through the same swampy thoughts, I picked a fallen log to sit on. I hardly noticed that it was slimy with moss as I was too busy gulping water and wolfing down rice balls and salted plums. When I stood, I felt a dampness on my back- side and realised the slimy moisture had left a mark. Resuming my upward mission, at some point I became aware that my insect stalker was nowhere around. This was something to be at least temporarily relieved about, amongst all of the uncertainty and other twisted phantasms. However, as always, I couldn’t be sure when it would return and in what form. I even wondered if it had shape-shifted into the crone and had been the one throwing the jagged can lids. The sun, obscured by thick grey blankets of cloud and the forest canopy, wasn’t available to give me an indication of the time or direction I walked. Fearing that I would still be climbing at night fall, I quickened my pace. My energy flagged but I pressed on through the dense forest and my body’s resistance until the vegetation began thinning and the apex of the mountain came into my view. If my legs hadn’t ached as they had, I would’ve danced a little jig right there on the mountain track, I felt so relieved. The winding forest path broke, opening out onto a road. I crossed over, passed through a small grove of maples and arrived at the base of a stone staircase. Beside it, a large tourist bus was parked. I climbed the steps, trying not to squash small spirals of plant life which sprouted through cracks in the stone, defying their regularity. A mob of white-clad elderly pilgrims moved ahead of me on the stairs. They were painfully slow, but I was too, after all my hard walking. I followed them up the many steps and along another path, all the way into the temple area.

40 Once there, the pilgrims began what appeared to be a ritual; they took turns banging a large gong and bowing. They washed their hands at a fountain by scooping water on them from a trough with small pots on sticks, then they each lit a candle and placed it among others on a large rack. Re- lieved that I could imitate them and appear to know what I was doing, I followed suit. It felt as though I was being gently carried on the wave of their reverence. The endorphins which washed through my body after the trek seemed also to be buoying me, as none of my earlier resentment towards Kyoko was present. Pessimism seemed like a distant cousin, who showed up only to cause trouble. On entry to the temple proper, the pilgrims produced small red books and began chanting from them. The sound was rhythmic, both haunting and comforting at once, although I was frustrated at not understanding the words. I began to feel awkward and out of place, and although I couldn’t see it, now suddenly I could feel the presence of the insect. It wasn’t at all deterred by my being in the sacred temple area; in fact it seemed encouraged by it. It was there in my itchy skin and in the faintest buzzing sound in my ears. I bowed my head, intending to somehow absorb the power of the chants of the pilgrims, hoping that this would help to banish my otherworldly assailant. After completing their ritual, the group of elderly folk drifted out again into the courtyard area. Many smiled and seemed jovial. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was the butt of the jokes they seemed to share, but I did not wish to fixate on such a paranoid proposition. Instead I studied them. ‘Orientalist!’ the political correctness pedant in me shouted in my head. But every thought had a double-think twin. ‘But I am half-Arab!’ the defence came. ‘We're half Polish too!’ ‘So what?’ the pedant hissed. I couldn’t be bothered moderating such a mundane debate and paid attention to the pilgrims’ outfits instead. Most of them wore practical attire along with their white robes: orthotic loafers, some in practical knitted caps, some in tidy boaters, or the straw pilgrim cone hat like the one I’d left at Kanda-san’s. Many wore shiny rimmed sunglasses which they’d intermittently drop to their chests on beaded chains. They all seemed linked together in an enviable camaraderie of senior citi- zenry and sensible accessories. Longing for upholstered seating and the soothing sensation of engine propelled motion, I followed the group back to their bus, wondering for a moment if I could somehow stowaway. But I very quickly realised that I would stand out like a snake on a cake if I tried. So, instead, I decided to be more upfront — when it was my turn in line, I would ask the uniformed driver if he had a spare seat. I watched him while he stood by the door assisting passengers up the steps with a white cotton 41 gloved hand, marking off their names on a piece of paper clipped to a board. He sported oiled and combed-over black strands of hair which resembled a barcode on his shining pate. I sidled into the queue and stood behind a woman who was about to board. She had a dowager’s hump and wore a navy blue sun visor with a small green caterpillar embroidered on it. After the driver helped her onto the bus, I bowed to him. He stood completely still and silent, only eyeing me. ‘Are there any spare seats? May I…?’ I ventured, placing my muddy boot on the metal bus step. His eyebrows suddenly shot up and he began waving his cotton gloved hands around. ‘Jousha dekimasen,’ he replied, which I did not understand. I was bamboozled by his flapping hands. It was almost avant-garde. I raised my arms up, my palms parallel to the sky and begged, ‘Please!?’ In reply, he formed an ‘X’ with his arms, now saying something else which I couldn’t understand, this time his voice louder than before. His message quite clear now, I retreated from the bus steps. If I felt misunderstood at home, then here in this situation, my predicament was exaggerated. Wracked with self-pity, I didn’t straight away reflect on how aggressive my attempt to board their bus might’ve seemed to the driver and the passengers. I skulked away from the scene I’d made, only peripherally aware of the stares of the elderly pilgrims on the bus and those who I had pushed in front of in the queue. With no particular destination in mind, I tried to flee the scene. But before I could go very far, I sensed something behind me and turned to find an almost impossibly tiny and slightly bent woman shuffling towards me. She had black hair and features which almost disappeared into her wrinkled square face. Her eyebrows were straight black lines, perfect as calligraphy strokes. She held in her hand a wooden staff, similar to the one I had seen many of the pilgrims using. She bowed and tried to hand it to me. My instinct was to refuse it; I shook my head and tried to wave her gift away. But she insisted and kept pushing it towards my hand. I realised it was ruder not to accept it, so I took the staff from her and bowed in response. She bowed once more and then walked away. ‘Um…hey!’ I called, not even sure what I was going to say. But she didn’t turn around, perhaps because she hadn’t understood me, or perhaps it was that she couldn’t even hear me. ‘Thank you!’ I shouted anyway and watched her shuffle back to the bus, where the driver gently gripped her arm and hoisted her up the step. I twirled the staff in my hand for a moment, before realising that the light was draining from the day and night would soon settle on the mountain. I walked back up the stone steps to see if I could find a sheltered nook in which to set up camp.

42 Up in the temple garden, the wind tickled the shrubs and trees. The temple itself was proud and ornate, its roof tiles shining, almost reptilian. Admiring the stillness of its angles and curves and forgetting why I was up there, I jumped when I heard someone or something exclaim ‘Ha!’ I spun around, but on exploring the precinct, I discovered there was no-one there but me. I had no inclina- tion to worry about what it was that had made the strange and sudden sound, because my investiga- tions had led me to a far-off corner, where a small wooden shack stood. Approaching it, I noticed that off to one side was another small building, the door of which was ajar, revealing a traditional Japanese style squat toilet. On close inspection, the entire corner where the buildings stood was unkempt, especially compared with the manicured neatness of the area immediately surrounding temple. The two little buildings themselves were covered in peeling bone-coloured paint and the step at the door to the larger one was broken, but these incongruities were of no concern to me. My focus was on whether or not it would be okay to sleep in the shack for the night. Leaping up over the broken step, I entered the space. It was empty apart from a small red cushion and a gas lantern which sat on a raised tatami covered platform. I dropped my bag to the floor and went out again, this time to survey the squat toilet. It was clean enough and beside it, several packets of tissues were stacked on top of one another. I felt doubly elated at my excellent fortune and wished the person who had left the toilet tissue was there, so I could thank them and ask them about their hobbies, or anything at all they wished to talk about, no matter how prosaic or objectionable. I would’ve happily discussed the ins and outs of rectal examinations or neo-fascism, so lonely I suddenly felt. Yet there was another part of me which was relieved to be able to spend the night at the temple, without human engagement. I’d noticed a lock inside the door of the shack and planned to use it. Twilight had descended on the mountain and I began to think about light. It was one thing having a lantern, but I possessed no matches or cigarette lighter. Leaving my things inside the shack, I returned to the temple area. I filched a lit candle from the glass holder where perhaps thirty- five or forty candles still dripped and flickered. Shielding the candle’s flame with my cupped hand, I began to walk it back over to the shack. But halfway there, a small but very destructive gust of wind extinguished it. I cursed and ran back to the candle holder, this time vowing to myself to take better care in guarding the flame. But within moments of stepping away, again the flame went out. With every moment that passed, the sky grew darker. I knew that without lighting the gas lantern in my room, I would be in complete blackness and would have to go to sleep on the floor straight away. I thought about it for a few moments while aware of the rustling of the forest below and the

43 faint chiming of bells somewhere in the temple precinct. Then an idea made me swear out loud, for not having thought of it sooner. I ran back to the shack, grabbed the lantern and carried it back to the temple, walking this time with care. Taking a lit candle once more, I brought it to the wick in the lantern, turning on the gas dial. The gas hissed with certainty but the temperamental fire failed to catch. It took several attempts before a healthy flame sprung to life. Back at the shack, I slid the door closed and locked it. With the lantern at its cosy centre, the shack glowed, but the flame didn’t provide much warmth and as the temperature dropped with the fall of night, I decided to dress myself in all of my clothes. I took everything out of my bag and lay it all around me on the tatami. The sudden colour and texture that this added to the space was cheer- ing, but I was too cold to admire it. I pulled on leggings and singlets, followed by looser t-shirts and tops, then the bulkier sweaters, baggy dresses and cardigans. Finally I put my coat on. Although my movement had become quite restricted beneath the layers, I managed to set myself up a meal of tofu, rice balls and dried plums. After that, riding on a wave of physical exhaustion, I lay flat on my back on the tatami. Perhaps because I was still flooded with endorphins, sleep eluded me for quite a time. Just as I was began to drift off, I thought I heard the temple gong sound. This gave me a little start and began the cycle of wakefulness all over again. Eventually, to pacify myself, I thought about Daisuke and imagined our skins touching. Some minutes later, I found myself not in the liquid comfort of normal rest but in the nether swamp, between waking and sleeping, paralysed. There were sounds of metals grinding, smells sul- phurous, shadows leaping across the walls like flames. A heaviness was on my chest and through the gloom, I looked straight into the metallic face of the insect creature which sat astride me. It placed its mouth over my face and began to inhale sharply.

I woke to early morning bird song. Although on the one hand I could appreciate its pretti- ness, on the other it sounded perverse, given how unrested I felt. Still in my multiple layers of clothing, I waddled out of the shack, squinting into the brightness of the cool morning. Amongst the overgrown grass damp with dew, I found a rock to sit on and unfolded the map. The fact that I had never been any good at reading maps became very apparent to me at that moment. I realised from looking at it carefully, that I was not near the peak of the mountain, as I had thought the previous 44 day. The peak was still to come, and at its top another temple. I felt like crying; not because there was more climbing to do, but because of my disorientation and the trickiness of the landscape. I tried to cry, to release some of the anguish swelling inside me. But it came out as nothing more than an emotional dry retch — not a single tear flowed. The air was warming up, so I returned to the shack, stripped off some layers of clothing and stuffed them in my bag. Outside again, I marvelled at the way the insects and birds danced around flowers, their flutters and flaps catching the light. Such softness on this island, that I’d not known anywhere else As if everything had been hand-drawn rather than printed by machines. As though here, we were all from a different age. The next temple on the path was Tairyūji, the Great Dragon Temple. I estimated that I could achieve the six kilometres to it that morning, leaving me enough time to make it down the other side of the mountain and up the next smaller one in the afternoon. Doing so would enable me to arrive at the next temple that same day. It appeared that there was a hamlet in the valley between the two mountains and I felt fairly optimistic that I would be able to purchase more food and water there. Satisfied with my plan, I had a last look inside the shack to ensure I’d left no trace and traipsed back towards the temple. Nearing the stone entry way, I noticed another crowd of elderly bus travellers making their way up. Feeling a strong urge to avoid them lest I became tempted again to stowaway on their bus and relive the rejection and humiliation of the day before, I turned and walked around to the back of the temple site, crossed over a road and via a break in the forest, entered a dirt track. The map indi- cated that this was the way to the next temple, so it was perfect, anyway. Almost immediately the incline was steep and I had to watch my footing so as not to trip over twisted tree roots. Now the staff that the pilgrim had given me the day before proved its worth. Rooting it in the mountain floor with every step, I hoisted myself up and along. Occasionally, from the corner of my eye, I noticed little forest sprites flying, sweeping the air clean with brooms made from sticks and leaves. Quick swishes of silvery orange in the bushes made me realise that spirit foxes were also close and at one point I saw a red hand dangling from a tree. I blinked once and it was gone. Little by little, though, the presence of these strange beings and appendages began to thin out. I found myself walking in mental silence, but for the odd fleeting thought of little consequence. I didn’t even feel any fear of my insect assailant. I didn’t know how long this period lasted as I had no watch or phone, but also because time didn’t seem to have any meaning in the quiet. For a while, there was simply walking. 45 Arriving at Tairyūji, I was aware of the protocol this time and carried out each step diligent- ly — bowing, washing my hands, sounding the gong, lighting candles. It all occurred like an elegant merging of disparate selves through the movements, not unlike a dance and dancer. But a part of me looked on cringing, jeering, ‘You’re not Japanese!’ ‘Obviously!’ I replied to myself and carried on with the ritual. After exiting the temple, I hazarded a few congenial nods to some elderly pilgrims who milled around outside and was about to set off on the next part of the walk, when I noticed another pilgrim, a stray-looking one like me. We both walked from different sides of the precinct, almost in mirror image of one another and met at the top of some stone stairs. She was taller than the elderly pilgrims, carried a backpack on her back and a staff in her hand like I did, but she wore a straw pilgrim hat like the one I’d left at Kanda-san’s. In it she resembled a tall type of mushroom amongst a crop of the button variety. ‘Hello. Do you speak English?’ she asked, smiling, her speech steady and unhurried. ‘Yes, I do!’ I replied, overjoyed at the opportunity to connect. She looked a similar age to me and wore her straw hat over reddish brown hair which hung in a thick plait over her left shoulder. I had to resist a childish urge to pull it, not out of meanness, but more to test her apparent equanimity. ‘Are you walking to temple twenty-three?’ she inquired. ‘Yes, I am. Are you also?’ ‘Hai,’ she said, pushing her hat back up higher on her head to stop it from sliding over her eyes. ‘Shall we, then?’ I gestured down the steps. She nodded, and side by side, we left the temple precinct and walked towards the forest pathway. She asked me my name and told me hers was Michiko and then she pulled a hand-held field recorder from her pocket. She said she was recording animals and the sounds of chanting at the temples for an art project. I was amazed at the coincidence, considering my idea that I’d told Bron about, to record insects, cats and monks. We walked without speaking for a time, which I appreciated. Although I wished to speak of my recent experiences and to ask Michiko questions, so many questions, I was apprehensive about saying anything at all about how I had found myself in the present situation. Kyoko had given me a definite warning not to tell anyone anything, but because she hadn’t explained why, I was confused. I told myself I’d wait and perhaps later in the conversation I would mention something small about what I’d been through in the previous days. Perhaps in doing so, I could use Michiko’s reaction as a 46 gauge for whether this experience was something I could trust. To the beat of our footfalls, I carried out an internal monologue about cultural sensitivity. Is it rude to ask questions in Japan? Is small talk socially acceptable? Eventually I hazarded some queries. ‘Are you a sound artist?’ I started. ‘More of a sound scientist,’ Michiko replied a little coyly. Indeed, she seemed restrained. But still I continued, my curiosity overriding my nervousness about saying the wrong thing. ‘I’d love to hear more about that, Michiko! I have sound theories and ideas all the time. Just the other day, I…yeah…sound is great,’ I broke off, realising I could too easily sail into personal waters. Instead, I changed tack. ‘Have you been to many other temples?’ ‘Hmm?’ Michiko seemed not to understand or hear me, or perhaps she was offended by my asking, as I had feared she would be. But before I could repeat the question, it was as though she suddenly comprehended it. ‘Oh yes, sorry, I have been walking since number one.’ And as she seemed not in the least bit offended by my asking, I continued. ‘Have you walked alone the whole time?’ ‘Well, apart from sometimes walking with another pilgrim or two.’ She paused. ‘And of course Kobo Daishi. Yes, apart from that, I have been alone.’ She punctuated her sentences with taps of her staff to the ground. ‘Kobodaishi? Who is that?’ She brought a hand to her mouth to try to stifle a small giggle. Enunciating every syllable and barely speaking the “i” at the end of the name, she explained, ‘Ko-bo Dai-shi…. is a monk who brought Buddha to the people of Japan. Before him, Buddha was a colonial influence only for the very wealthy and…’ She stopped and looked into the tree canopy above us, as though searching there for the perfect word. ‘Elite?’ I ventured after a while. ‘Elite, nani? What’s meaning?’ She looked at me sidelong. ‘Elite means, you know, people who are separate from others, or think they are better, or something?’ I raised my staff in the air as if to indicate hierarchy. ‘Okay, yes, I think before Kobo Daishi, in Japan, Buddhism was just for “elite” people.’ She winced very slightly, as though tasting something unpleasant. ‘And how about everyone else?’ ‘Shinto. Many Japanese now are both Shinto and Buddhist. And many work long hours and go shopping for their spiritual practices…’ 47 I laughed, not sure if she was joking. ‘Really?’ ‘A foreigner once suggested to me that the modern religion here is “Team Japan!” I find that a little harsh, though. Aren’t many nations like this?’ ‘Yes, you’re right. And you said you are not alone, because of Kobo Daishi?’ I asked, puff- ing now. Although the staff helped, I was straining with the weight of my pack and the steepness of the mountain. ‘It is said that Kobo Daishi accompanies the walkers of this pilgrimage to eighty-eight temples. His presence is most felt through the use of these staves. So, he is with you already!’ She pointed with her staff to mine. A dry laugh escaped from my mouth. I gripped the staff tightly in my hand for a moment. I didn’t know if there was a kind of cultural sentimentality that I was missing, or if I truly did feel the presence of a benevolent monk. ‘Has this pilgrimage been good for you?’ Her tone switched from being conversational to softly inquisitive. I thought about what she’d asked . It was difficult to answer. My pilgrimage had only recently begun and its circumstances seemed so unusual. ‘Yes, I think so; so far, anyway. It gets me away from staring at the internet everyday until my eyes hurt, so that’s something.’ I was exaggerating; I also took walks on the beach back home. But here in this verdant zone, I was beginning to realise that a number of my life’s mundane occu- pations were not healthy. Then came the clicks again in my ear, the same ones I’d heard in the days prior to leaving for Japan. I shuddered and looked behind me, but saw nothing but lush forest and the dwindling path as we rounded a corner. ‘That’s good then, that you came,’ Michiko replied. We walked on, bolstered by our staffs and a feeling of comfort in the silence between us. The path soon narrowed such that we could no longer walk side by side. Michiko took the front and I plodded behind her, the ground steepening with each step. For all my earlier feelings of strength and capability, I began to feel strained and sore. I found I could no longer enjoy the forest around us and had to pick a focal point in order not to succumb to the sloping earth. I chose Michiko’s navy blue canvas sand shoes. It was almost as if they barely touched the ground, her steps were so light. I dropped back, the distance between us expanding. Breathing hard, I tried to call out to her that I needed a break, but she’d disappeared around a bend. So I struggled on.

Left, right, left 48 Can of beans, Right, right, Country, Woopsie doo!

I managed to chant a fractured version in my mind before arrows in my chest and legs brought me to a standstill. The corners of my eyes glimpsed ethereal ninja stars spinning through the trees, catching the light which filtered through the branches. The vision was stunning and I could’ve admired it, had I not been in pain from walking. I tried to lean against a skinny adolescent bamboo trunk beside the path but it swayed under my weight. Michiko reappeared, buoyant and smiling, higher above me on the mountain. She’d walked back to see where I was, it seemed. I watched her casually take a bottle from her pack and swig from it. Her face was exactly the same sandy colour as before, whereas mine, I was sure, was scarlet with heat. ‘Are you okay, Magda?’ she called down to me. ‘Yeah,’ I lied. The exertion had just about finished me for the day, and I felt an underlying anger, too. ‘How dare you?’ I could’ve screamed, after recovering my breath. But to who, I wasn’t sure. It certainly wasn’t Michiko’s fault. And Kyoko? I had chosen to go with her, after all. I could only be angry with myself. ‘We’re not far from the temple,’ Michiko called over her shoulder as she took off again, dis- appearing around the corner. I didn't really care to see the temple, only for the day’s walk to end. Putting one foot in front of the other, trying to ignore the pain slicing into my calf muscles and my ragged breath, I pressed on. Soon enough, the temple gates came into view. After resting for several moments on the entryway steps, we carried out our temple ablutions and ritual. Michiko switched on her field recorder and captured herself reading from a small red book, the rhythmic sounding words that I’d heard others chanting before. After the ritual, she knelt at a stone fishpond and began recording the babbling sounds of the water and of frogs calling. Leaving her to it, I walked slowly around, watching the trees all the while. Faces appeared in the various arrangements of their leaves and the spaces around them, and in the knots and burrs on their trunks. Some of the trees wore eager grins and winked, as though glad I was there. Some appeared weary, their features drooping. Others looked cross, with mean eyes and hard lines formed by twigs for mouths. It was fairly obvious to me that their expressions mirrored the spectrum of my own thoughts and feelings about the walk. But that didn’t stop me wondering if they were au- 49 tonomous beings, or simply tiny portions of my ego, disowned, split off and anthropomorphising objects around me. ‘Are you me, or something more?’ I demanded of one such tricky looking face, formed by the leaves of a shrub. It nodded in the breeze. I waited for Michiko to finish recording and we found a little wall on the perimeter of the precinct to sit on. The stone felt cool through my trousers, making me shiver. My body’s temperature began to dip after the heat of my earlier exertion dissipated. Small patches of blue sky peeped from behind the omnipresent curtains of grey but the sun remained in hiding. Michiko rifled through her bag and extracted food items one by one, placing them on the stone wall between us. I admired her pretty display of rice balls, salted plums and a small bag of dried fish. ‘Douzo,’ she said and gestured towards the spread. I stared at her quizzically, wondering if ‘douzo’ was the name of one of the food items. ‘Please help yourself!’ She smiled. I reciprocated her offering with some snacks from my own bag — a packet of dried seaweed and some sweet and salty rice crackers which I enjoyed snapping between my fingers more than I enjoyed eating. We ate without speaking for a time. Even- tually I asked her about the words she had read from the book, what they’d meant. She told me it was the Heart Sutra and then she paused for a long time, looking into the middle distance, a tiny rumple appearing between her eyes. Finally, she explained, ‘It means we cannot believe anything. All experience is empty and groundless. There is nothing at all to hold onto and even that is not certain.’ I was surprised by the starkness of it and told her so. ‘Yes, but, in its emptiness there is so much fullness too. It means its opposite too. It’s how I experience it. It’s not just for my head, but the whole of experience.’ I wondered if something was being lost in translation or if it was just that I was trying to grasp a paradox with the rational part of my mind. I wanted to ask Michiko why she was on the pilgrimage. I sensed that it was more than just chanting Buddhist doctrine and recording sounds, but I delayed inquiring. The timing didn’t feel right. Something also prevented me from asking her about where she had stayed each night on the walk. She didn’t appear to be carrying camping gear — her bag was too small. Although I had never minded squatting in my home country when I’d needed to, I harboured a concern that I had committed a cultural faux pas by squatting at the Crane Forest Temple. Here, I felt so visible, as though a representative of all non-Japanese people. A bad egg, out to desacralise all that the Japanese had honoured for millennia. No sooner had we finished our food and begun the next part of the walk down to the hamlet in the valley, Michiko raised the topic herself. 50 ‘Some temples have little accommodations for pilgrims. Did you see them?’ ‘Yes, I stayed in one! It was great!’ I confessed, perhaps a little over-zealous in my relief to hear her refer to them as “accomodations.” It seemed I hadn’t desecrated the temple zone at all. We shared our enjoyment at the simplicity of the shacks; how comforting we’d found them. Then seriousness came over Michiko. ‘For tonight, better to think of something else. I need to visit the hamlet for food and yet the next temple is too far from there to travel to before nightfall. And the map doesn’t show any free accommodations nearby.’ I mentally calculated and recalculated my funds, trying to construct a budget for the remaining temples I was supposed to visit, according to Kyoko’s note. Each time I looked at the map to try and understand just how many days that would take, I found myself even more confused than previously. ‘We probably need to find a hotel.’ We likely had no choice, and she agreed. The walk down the mountain was fairly easy compared to the way up, apart from the constant need for caution against slipping. We both adopted a sidestepping gait while remarking on the beauty of the forest surrounding us and how much the bus pilgrims were missing. Just as the hamlet came into view, Michiko consulted her wristwatch and said we’d made good time. Out of nowhere, my curiosity bubbled up. ‘Why are you doing this?’ As soon as I asked however, I realised the inevitability of her asking me the same thing. I swore inwardly, promising myself I would evade giving too much away. She dropped her head and swallowed hard. At the same moment, I noticed a sorrowful face in the leaves of some vegetation overhanging our path. I stared it down, daring it to distract me from being present with Michiko. In a reedy voice, she began to share about her brother. He had died several months previously at the age of twenty-six, after being ill for a year. ‘All kinds of things happened. A doctor made very bad mistakes. We only heard about alternative treatments when it had become too late. But maybe the worst of it was the way the people around him…around us all, behaved. They acted so selfishly. His girlfriend left when we got the news he was terminally ill. Friends disappeared. I’ve seen something very ugly about people that has stayed with me.’ She shook her head and scrubbed a tear from her cheek with her knuckles. ‘Or, maybe they just couldn’t cope with him dying, for their own reasons.’ My heart sank as she spoke, but I fought hard with my busy mind to listen closely to what she was telling me. It was difficult to prevent her story from propelling me into thoughts of people back home, in particular Tomas’s family. His parents had subjected him and his sisters to inordinate control, after which they had blamed their children for what they perceived as their failings in the 51 adult world. They’d been refugees from eastern Europe and were no doubt traumatised by their own experiences. But for how long could trauma excuse abuse? I wanted to mention Tomas to Michiko, to let her know that I also knew of these shadows in human nature, the various ways people were incapable of handling difficulty. I also wanted to speak of the death of my mother but I didn’t know how to, without making her brother’s death seem all about me. So I rooted myself to the moment, with each step we took, breathing the mountain air and the sadness that Michiko carried. But Michiko must’ve somehow sensed that I had thought of home. She asked me what town I was from. When I told her, she laughed suddenly and began to speak a little feverishly. ‘Recently I have returned to university to do research in sound. I read a paper about the student who was almost kicked out of the university in your west coast town, for doing a controversial experiment.’ ‘What happened?’ ‘She was interested in the impacts of silence on the nervous system, but she may have picked the wrong place to explore this. Some of the professors became very frightened of her methodology.’ ‘Why? What did she do?’ For a moment, I imagined all kinds of abject human and animal experiments. ‘She sat in silence for her entire twenty minute presentation at a postgraduate symposium without telling anyone what she was doing or why she was doing it. One of the senior academics threw a piece of paper in the air and stormed out of the room. The student continued to hold her space. Some other senior academics complained about her, but she had some strong support from a few academics who understood what she was doing and they managed to convince the dean to let her stay on in her course. She has since written some interesting work on it. She speculates that it was not her ideas or even what she did, or didn’t do, which inflamed the academics, as much as how she came to them so vulnerably. She swapped the intellect for other kinds of awareness. And her vulnerability reminded them of their own vulnerability, so they had no choice but to take her down, in a managerial kind of way.’ ‘Oh, I can totally imagine that happening in my town.’ I felt embarrassed and in that moment, thankful that I was very far from there. ‘Don’t worry. Japan is very conservative and oppressive too. More so, I think. We have to be very cautious if we want to transform things. We can’t be too open or too confrontational.’

52 ‘Yes, I also know what that’s like. I can’t be too open about my life.’ And then I almost told her my secrets — the ones Kyoko had asked me not to tell. But imagining her disappointment in me, instead I made something up about coming to Japan to forget who I was, or maybe to remember. ‘Whichever happens is okay,’ I said, by way of rounding off the story, noticing at the same time that the vegetation was thinning. Before long, the mountain track delivered us onto a road, which we trudged along for ten or so minutes more, until we found ourselves in a village. We stopped outside a small restaurant. An elderly man sat on a wooden bench adjacent to the front door. ‘Gaijin-san!’ he lisped, his mouth a toothless cavern. ‘What does he mean?’ I whispered to Michiko while bowing back at the man who remained in a deep bow himself. ‘It means Mrs Foreigner!’ she laughed. ‘Oh,’ I replied. ‘I suppose he doesn’t meet many foreigners?’ Michiko shrugged and gestured to the restaurant door. ‘Shall we eat here?’ I nodded. Delicious smells wafted from within and caused me a kind of financial amnesia; my budget could not have been further from my mind as my mouth began watering. Michiko held the small entry curtain apart and we stepped inside. A waitress greeted us and showed us to a table on a raised tatami-covered platform. ‘We must remove our shoes,’ Michiko warned before I had a chance to climb onto the platform. As we both sat on its edge, I noticed that after Michiko had removed her boots, she stretched and wriggled her toes, lingering for a moment, saying nothing, only staring at something I couldn’t see. I felt again the weight of her grief and anger about her brother’s death. We sat opposite each other on small burgundy-coloured cushions at a low table. The tiny restaurant was empty apart from us. On the walls, strips of crisp fabric painted with Japanese calligraphy hung. Every now and then a current of air from the heating system would make them dance. The waitress reappeared and began speaking to us both, as though I could understand. ‘She wants me to translate for you,’ Michiko said, nodding at the same time. Another woman, perhaps the cook, bustled out of the kitchen and sidled over to stand beside the waitress. They appeared stolid and practical, shiny with hard kitchen work. There was a kind- ness about them too, touching their gleaming faces with soft grace. Michiko began to translate. ‘She is very surprised to see a foreigner dressed in Ohenro clothes with a Japanese. She wants to know how we met. I told her.’ Michiko paused for a moment in her translation, exclaiming, 53 ‘Eh!?’ and a few other words in Japanese. ‘She says we should stay the night here on the restaurant floor. She is annoyed with me because she thinks I must be pushing you too hard. She thinks you are tired.’ ‘Really?’ I was incredulous and stared at all three of them. I had never been invited to sleep in a restaurant before. ‘I am surprised too. But she is serious. She says she and her sister own this place.’ Michiko nodded to the cook. ‘They sometimes offer their place to Ohenro, especially if they think they look tired. They are actually worried about you.’ She looked quickly at the waitress, then back at me. ‘She keeps suggesting that I might be quite a rude person.’ I wished for a moment that I could explain about the insect possession and that Michiko had in fact only been a beacon of hope to me on the journey. But Michiko didn’t seem to be too bothered by the restauranteur’s judgement. I noticed her very subtly roll her eyes, impatient but not pained. I wondered if this was because she had experienced far worse than being told by someone who didn’t know her, that she was rude. But, still, I wasn't willing to stay if the price was my new friend being chastised. I told Michiko as much. She waved off my concern. The waitress took our orders for drinks. ‘She told me there is only one kind of udon on the menu today. Is it okay?’ I stared at Michiko blankly for a moment, then smiled. We sat in peaceful silence and I traced the number eighty-eight with my finger on the table top until the waitress returned with our beers. She placed the sweating glasses of amber fluid in front of us. ‘Our journey is complete for today, don’t you think?’ Before I could answer, Michiko raised her glass, exclaiming, ‘Kanpai!’ ‘Cheers!’ We clinked glasses. While sipping my beer, I looked out of the window. A very fine drizzle floated in the air, pushed around by increasing gusts of wind. Several people scuttled along the street beneath umbrellas, making me relieved to be inside. I thought about how earlier, the udon shop proprietors had introduced themselves to us as Reiko and Yuko. I realised that every Ja- panese woman I’d met had “ko” as a suffix to their name, apart from Kanda-san. I told Michiko this and she smiled, remarking that Kanda must’ve been her surname. This led her to asking me who Kanda was and I realised I was treading close to telling her more than I should. Instead, I fabricated a story, by borrowing a very old friend’s. At my high school, we had been offered the opportunity to go on an exchange programme to either Japan or France. At that age, the idea of being overseas without anyone I knew was frightening to me, so I 54 made no expression of interest. One of my close friends Maxine, however, had wanted to go and her parents had been able to afford to pay for her to visit Japan for three weeks. She had stayed in the countryside with a family, referring to it as a home-stay. I could still taste the tingling melon- flavoured chewing gum she’d given to me on her return, which I had unwrapped from dainty packets and chewed up in a single sitting. I had no idea if such opportunities existed for adults but I risked it and told Michiko that I had come to Japan on a home-stay programme, but had left because my host, Kanda-san, had been a psychopath. I explained how she had locked me in the house for no reason and had threatened me with secateurs. Michiko stared at me for a moment. The atmosphere between us had shifted and I wasn’t sure if I’d taken my half-truth disclosure too far. Regardless, I felt rotten inside to be lying to her. She seemed like such a genuinely kind person, and she was strange too, in the best possible way. I told myself that I would reveal the whole story to her, about Kyoko, about why I was on the pilgrimage — everything— as soon as I knew the answers myself. But I worried that our closeness was already slipping away because of my deceit. Before I could fret any more about it, Reiko delivered our meals to our table. Clumsy with my chopsticks at my first attempt, I dropped tempura prawns and eggplant back into my soup, causing ungainly spatters on my robes. Michiko didn’t seem bothered by this, in fact she barely noticed. I tried to ask her about her brother but she changed the topic to discussing Ohenro and its significance within Japanese culture, especially regarding death. We finished our meals and the women appeared and removed our bowls. They soon returned with two thin futon mattresses and some blue patterned woollen blankets. I asked Michiko whether the women were expecting customers for dinner. ‘They usually close after lunch during this season, they told me. In spring and early summer they stay open until late because there are more pilgrims. But it is now too cold for that. They said there was a busload earlier in the day who had come for lunch. Their place was full and they had almost run out of food. We are lucky that they could offer us our early dinner.’ After shifting a few tables to the edges of the tatami area, we set up the beds and stretched out on them. The women returned and talked more to us while it grew dark outside. At first Michiko translated but after a while she ceased. Later she told me she’d become too tired. She said they’d mainly been talking about their lives and interactions with Ohenros. They’d felt as if they didn’t need to travel anywhere themselves, because Japan and occasionally other parts of the world came to them through visitors. Eventually they bid us goodnight, explaining that their home was behind the building, so they hadn’t far to go. Then they left Michiko and I alone. 55 Michiko soon vanished down the corridor clutching her toiletry bag and a small towel. I fought hard against the sleep that was niggling me, because there were so many things I wanted to ask Michiko. I also wanted her near me to help me with my defence against the insect, which I could tell was lurking, biding its time until the moment I would succumb. Indeed, against my will, I soon tumbled into sleep and resurfaced in the gloom. A shadow sped past on the wall. At first I wondered what being it belonged to, but soon realised it was a being. It folded in on itself and morphed into a grey cat, which leaped to my bedside. Padding from my feet to my head, it curled around my neck. I relaxed for a moment in its affection, before realising it was very gradually constricting. Tighter and tighter it curled around my throat, pythonic now. I was on the brink of panicking when the cat vaporised into smaller fragments, which rolled off me and bounced to the floor like little balls of mercury. I watched as one by one, these silver spheres recapitulated, forming one giant seed pod with multiple nodes. Each node sprouted spectres which shot from their centres. Tall and gangly, soon these beings were many, creeping along the walls and the floor. Fascinating though it was to watch, I knew from experience that the show was not going to be free. Sure enough, the spectres leaped onto me and pinned me to my bed. At the same time, sticky glue emanated from their forms, entering my nostrils and throat. I tried to scream but the glue had jammed me up. All that came out was a suppressed moan. Where is Michiko? I inquired, as though there was some kind of site manager or director overseeing my waking nightmare. I even wondered if there was a benevolent tour guide hiding somewhere who could advise me in this realm of husks, slime, shadows and shells. But no guide or supervisor spoke up. All I could hear instead was grinding metals, distant groaning and the unintel- ligible whispers of thousands of voices. Then, from the gloom, a new performance emerged; around seven or eight tall beings began writhing in a strange dance macabre, while from their midst, the insect clattered along the floor towards me. I tried as hard as I could to muster the will to wake myself up. But alas, I remained bound by the sticky spectres and their foul glue. The insect launched at my torso and attached itself to my solar plexus with its claws. There it took a long drink from the well of my life-force. Pumped up now on stolen energy, it raised me in the air like a puppet and twirled me around the room, all the while whispering into my ear nonsensical words mashed up with static interference. Then it lay me back down and attached its proboscis to my mouth and drank again. The shrinking boundaries of my awareness merged with the night and a deep sleep this time, which lasted until the morning.

56 *

The dawn light looked pinky grey through the restaurant windows. To a soundtrack of early bird- song, Michiko and I attempted to consult the map together, spreading it on the table between our breakfast of rice and fermented beans, which had been delivered to us by Reiko. Before long the map’s lines began to twist and dance in front of my eyes. The skin on my face felt tight, and a tired grumpiness coloured everything; all that I looked at, all that I thought about. While watching her drop rice on the map and trace her finger along its roads, marking out our day’s journey, I resolved to tell Michiko everything. I hadn’t the energy to hide the truth if we were going to be spending so much time together. I no longer even knew if I believed in my promised new life. I heard a fly buzz; a hum that came close and then far, close and then far. It landed on my lips. Brushing it away, I began to blurt to Michiko about everything: Kyoko, my abrupt departure from home, the plane ride, being detained at Kanda-san’s, my potential new life ahead. I even told her of my little insect secret, giving as an example what had happened during the previous night. She listened in silence, one of her fingers still on the map. When I reached the end of my confession, she blinked hard at me a few times and took her mobile phone out from her bag. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, panicking without knowing precisely why. My skin prickled and itched and the wall behind Michiko’s head performed several inhalations and exhalations. I found the exit with my eyes, simultaneously securing the zips on my backpack which sat near my feet. Michiko noticed me doing so, and shook her head gently, some Japanese words forming through a smile. ‘Magda!’ she said my name to whoever it was that was on the other end of the phone. I half stood and stretched my torso across the table, bringing my face close to hers. ‘Who are you speaking to?’ I hissed. She shook her head almost imperceptibly but still, I understood that she was trying to quieten me. At that, I grabbed my bag from the floor. She finished her conversation abruptly and placed a finger on the touchpad to disconnect. ‘Sit down, don’t worry!’ She laughed. ‘Who were you speaking to?’ My voice shook. ‘Kyoko, of course!’ she said, smiling widely. ‘Who?’ I thought I’d heard correctly, but wanted her to say it again, so I could be very sure. She repeated Kyoko’s name. The world outside seemed to push in on the walls. In turn, I could feel the walls moving to enclose me.

57 ‘Goodbye,’ I muttered, swinging the rucksack onto my shoulder. Snatching my shoes from the floor, I ran from the restaurant. My bare feet slapped the wet road and I could hear Michiko close behind me, shouting. ‘Wait, Magda! You’re not in trouble! You’ve passed the test!’ The last part I heard as the world upended itself and the heavy thud of something fast and hard slammed into my body. Everything went dark.

A formless entity urged me to pass through a membrane. Larval, I wriggled through, held and pushed in a paradox of harmonious tension and time dilation. I experienced this both inside and outside of myself simultaneously. Then it all shattered, forming shards, then mosaics. These dissipated and reformed like a kaleidoscope of mercurial fragments, and flew around faster and faster, until everything became completely still. ‘Another fuck to add to the cluster!’ A booming extra-dimensional voice gave commentary on the situation as I surfaced. I heard footsteps pounding the road and felt something warm and sticky against my cheek. Excruciating pain ripped through my shoulder, the one which had hit the ground. Michiko’s face was suddenly beside mine, crumpled with worry. She said my name over and over again. At first I thought I couldn’t move but I forced myself to sit up. The surge of pain in my shoulder shocked me. Someone else was on the ground several metres away, a bicycle on top of him. It took me a few moments to register that we must’ve collided. Is he ok? I wasn’t sure if I asked in my mind or out loud. Michiko was beside me, asking repeatedly, ‘Are you okay? Are you okay, Magda?’ while dialling numbers into her phone. At some point, Reiko and Yuko appeared and seeing that Michiko was by my side, they rushed to help the cyclist. Almost from outside of my body, I watched as he regained consciousness and sat up too. I touched the side of my head and then looked at my fingers. They dripped with scarlet blood. I would’ve almost delighted in the colour, had I not been hit by a sudden wave of nausea. I turned and purged onto the road. A crowd of people had gathered and someone was directing the small amount of traffic around us. Michiko helped me to stand. Leaning heavily on her thin frame, I winced in agony as she assisted me to hobble from the road. We passed the cyclist who was also on his feet by that stage, his cheek a mess of blood and bruising. Michiko led me to the small wooden bench in front of 58 Reiko’s and Yuko’s restaurant, where the lisping old man who had called me Mrs Foreigner had sat the day before. Someone put a ceramic cup in my hand from which I drank. It was caustic to my throat, already burned from bile, and put a fire in my chest which radiated warmth in my belly. At least for a moment, it helped ease my shock. The sound of sirens heralded ambulances. Moments later, two arrived, paramedics springing from them and throwing their doors open for me and the person I’d collided with. Someone guided me to lie on a stretcher and I acquiesced, even though it all felt excessive. I was able to walk, after all. Everybody spoke over me in Japanese, but only Michiko climbed into the ambulance with me. The door slammed shut and soon we were driving along a winding road. While it had initially bothered me that I’d been so zealously strapped in, I soon felt grateful to be held securely in place. Having to use my own energy to brace myself against the vehicle’s swerving would’ve been more than I could’ve managed. A paramedic leaned in and spoke to me in a baritone voice. Michiko translated: ‘Do any medicine make you catch a trouble?’ Her English seemed to have regressed, I assumed because of the stress of the situation. ‘I don’t understand...’ A moan trailed after my words. She tried again. ‘Do you catch a sick from the medicine?’ I stared at her, still confused. ‘Allergy?’ The paramedic asked while pressing his finger to the pulse at my wrist and looking at a small clock attached to his pocket. ‘No,’ I replied. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t worried either. I only hoped at this stage for pain relief. The paramedic showed me a plastic tube with a mouthpiece which looked a little like a whistle. He mimed inhaling from it, before placing it in my hand. I brought it to my mouth and sucked back a menthol tasting hit. I was immediately flooded with analgesic warmth. For the remainder of the ambulance ride, I floated in a dreamy soft haze of self-administered pain relief. Any time I felt a twinge of pain in my shoulder, I would simply take another hit from the whistle. When we arrived at the hospital, I was carried in on the stretcher and placed on a trolley, Michiko following all the while at a fast clip. I had no idea what she was telling them, but all the medical professionals seemed happy to talk to her and to help me. If anything, I even felt like somewhat of a celebrity — I couldn’t help but notice a small buzz of excitement amongst the staff. Perhaps because it was a country hospital, they didn’t see too many foreigners? Or perhaps I am imagining it all? I mused, at once feeling an incredible homesickness. I wanted my friends, people who spoke English. This strange hospital environment was alienating. It looked to be from another 59 era entirely, perhaps the 1960s or 70s, the mission brown fittings the giveaway. Even the hospital staff, the two wheeling my stretcher and the others whom I’d seen upon my admission and then fleetingly in the corridors, appeared to be from another time, with bowl haircuts and aviator spectacle frames. ‘What is going on?’ I managed to whisper to Michiko, who still trotted beside me as I was wheeled down one corridor after another. ‘You’re in the hospital.’ ‘I realise that. But why is everything so…’ I wasn’t sure if it looked old, or if the times I’d been to hospitals at home, I hadn’t properly noticed their design and decor. ‘Don’t worry, Magda. You will get very good treatment.’ Michiko smiled at me reassuringly, though she looked wan and clammy. I continued taking hits of the painkiller whistle and must’ve drifted off into a narcotic slumber because I had only faint recollections of being moved onto a hospital bed in a private room and having my clothing replaced with a hospital gown. I was quite sure at one stage that I rested on a cloud while all of this was occurring. I finally woke properly to the sound of two women conversing in Japanese. I listened for a while with closed eyes, in pain but not enough to call out. Their conversation was almost rhythmic. One would speak for quite a time, while the other punctuated her sentences with sounds of what I assumed were agreement. Then they would switch. Finally, I opened my eyes and saw that it was Kyoko in the room, in conversation with Michiko. Kyoko’s face looked tight, as though being pulled by invisible strings into a pensive expression. She wore her hair scraped into a pony tail. Michiko looked tired but still her usual gracious self. ‘Hey,’ I managed weakly. In unison, they stood from their vinyl upholstered seats at the edge of the room and came quickly to my bedside. ‘Hi Magda, what’s happened to you?’ Kyoko smiled gently. She rested her pointed fingers, neatly manicured with clear gloss, on the raised bed guard rail. ‘I would like to go home now,’ I stated, assuming this was the obvious and natural next step. A reactive current went between the two women, which was as plain to me as though they had spoken to one another. ‘Yes, I can imagine you would.’ Kyoko was choosing her words carefully, I could tell. ‘You can if you like. We can organise it. But first, those things you shared, about the insect creature that

60 is chasing you and attacking you…Well, we are in the business of supporting people in transforming this kind of thing, and it is still possible to work with us, if you want it.’ I looked at Michiko to gauge her reaction, as I couldn’t work out how I felt. ‘You had such a fright when you realised I was working together with Kyoko. I’m sorry I caused you to run off like that. I feel very bad about this.’ She lowered her head. The hospital gown was rough against my skin and I felt claustrophobic beneath the weight of the white blankets. The buttons, wires, smell of disinfectant and cold fluorescent lighting made me want to run like before, but this time, I knew I should not. Kyoko noticed me looking at a jug of water on the bedside. She filled a glass, unwrapped a straw and held them up to my lips. I drank all of the water down in two long sips.

‘I shouldn’t have run onto the road, that was silly, but…’ I felt I needed to take some responsibility for what had happened, but not entirely. ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner? About you two?’ And then I suddenly remembered the cyclist. ‘And what about the person on the bike?’ ‘He is okay, we think. Maybe same as you.’ Kyoko’s manner remained authoritative, and like a politician, she answered only the question she chose. I laughed at the absurdity of everything. The two women exchanged glances. Kyoko cleared her throat and reached across to the wall behind my bed. ‘We told the nurses we would call them when you woke up. You are going to have x-rays.’ ‘Who is paying for all of this, Kyoko? I don’t have travel insurance, obviously.’ ‘Don’t worry about that. It is taken care of.’ Kyoko dabbed at her face with a folded up piece of fabric which had a stylised depiction of the ocean on it. For a moment I became lost in its waves. ‘You just need to concentrate on getting well now. If you decide to stay, we will take you to a place where you can recover.’ ‘Not Kanda-san’s!!’ Panicking, I looked from Kyoko to Michiko and back again. ‘No, don’t worry. We won’t put you back there. Kanda-san is… maybe overly officious.’ Before I could make a sarcastic retort, someone in a white coat and shiny black sensible shoes appeared in the room. Like the other hospital staff members I’d seen on my way in, she too had a bowl haircut and wore wire-rimmed spectacles. She exchanged bows with other two. ‘English?’ she asked me. ‘Yes,’ I replied. She smiled at me, but then her expression seemed to freeze on her face for an unnaturally long period of time. I noticed drops of perspiration forming on her nose.

61 ‘My English is not very good,’ she finally stammered. Following this, she broke out into a long stream of Japanese to Kyoko and Michiko, who nodded and made various sounds. Kyoko turned to me. ‘She said she is worried that her English isn’t very good and she would like us to translate. Her name is Dr Sugisaki. She is presiding over your care. She’s going to mea- sure your blood-pressure and heart beat, then take you for an x-ray. After that we might be able to leave. Is it okay?’ I shrugged my good shoulder. We hadn’t finished the discussion on whether I’d stay or go, but I had decided that I wanted to stay. Oddly, it had been the fabric with which Kyoko had wiped the sweat on her face that had moved me. I’d all but given up on believing that the experience of being here was going to solve my insect problem, but this fabric’s elegance did not exist anywhere in my life back at home. I couldn't leave yet. The x-ray revealed nothing was broken. I was very lucky, Dr Sugisaki had said. My head wound was only superficial and the dressing was all that they could do for it. But due to the impact of the collision upon my shoulder, I would need to rest my arm in a sling for at least five days, she stressed, and try not use it at all in that time. All the while that Dr Sugisaki spoke and Kyoko translated, I watched a fly crawl along the wall behind their heads. How had it transgressed the sanitary borders of the hospital? Had it breached faulty fly wire? Travelled in through the front doors, into the lobby and up the elevator on the tailwind of an emergency? It gave me no answers, only continued to crawl, watching with its multiple eyes. Always watching.

With my arm in a sling and a fistful of pain-relieving tablets, I managed to limp along behind Michiko and Kyoko as they led me out of the hospital. I flinched each time a very high-pitched woman’s voice squeaked an announcement over the public address system. We’d been standing for only a moment in the car park when it began to drizzle. Kyoko and Michiko simultaneously whipped out clear, compact umbrellas from their bags. The two vinyl canopies collided with each other as though in a subtle fight about which would shelter me. Michiko's won but only because Kyoko seemed to spy a car in the distance and turned her attention to waving it over. Once it pulled up, I realised it was Daisuke. After greeting us with smiles, he took the bags and loaded them in the boot, while Kyoko opened the front passenger side door for me. Mindful of my various pains, I climbed carefully into 62 the car, noticing the smell of some kind of fresh essential oil. I remembered my enthusiasm about Daisuke and his delightful teeth and boots when we’d first met, only now, in pain, I felt far less susceptible to maintaining my crush on him. It wasn’t that he didn’t exude the same degree of warmth and the faintest hint of silver-booted silliness as he had in our first encounter. In fact, I checked his feet on the car’s pedals, and there they were, those boots, shining in the gloom of the lower part of the car. But I was in too much pain to feel dazzled by them and could only whimper from time to time, in agony. I was unable to turn my head and look at either of the women in the back seat, so with my good arm and hand, I angled the sun visor in order to see them in its vanity mirror. Attempting first to clear the choked feeling from my throat, I asked Michiko if it was true that her brother had died. She met my eyes in the reflection and I saw again the sadness that I’d felt in her during our walks. ‘Yes, it’s true.’ She said hoarsely. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ I wasn’t lying — I was sorry, but I was also wondering if her pain was making her do strange things, like tricking me. ‘But I should tell you, the student at the university in your town? The one who upset the professors with her silence? That was me. My project is called “Silent Treatment” and I’m still kind of working on it. It may be a lifelong operation. And I met Kyoko at the beach not so long before you did.’ I angled the mirror to try to catch Kyoko’s facial expression. For just a moment, she reminded me of a balloon that had been filled with too much air, as though she was trying to hold something back but could easily pop. Meanwhile, Daisuke had pulled the car into what looked like the entry area of a large hotel. The four of us sat in silence for a few moments. I was about to ask where we were, but realised it made no difference to me anyway. Through the windows I saw uniformed staff standing in front of large glass doors. And then one of them, a valet with shining gold epaulettes, opened the door for me.

I woke the next morning in a large hotel room in a western-style bed which was too soft. The pain in my body, my shoulder especially, reminded me instantly of the events of the previous day which began to play over and over like a film in my mind. I popped some hospital pain killers from a blister pack on the bedside and swallowed them with a glass of cold tea. Managing to pull myself from the bed, I made my way to the bathroom, whimpering with each step. The bath, thankfully, was a 63 very deep one, Japanese style; I would be able to sit upright and still be covered in water, much like at Kanda-san’s. The sound of the water gushing from the taps seemed somehow to ameliorate the loneliness I was feeling, but not my squeamishness at having to deal with the wound to my temple. Standing at the basin, I peeled away the bandage and examined the gash. It had started to scab over but when I brought some water to it, blood began to flow through my fingers, brilliant against the stark white of the basin. I hit more tablets and slipped beneath the bath water, waiting for them to take effect. Drying myself afterwards, I winced at each brush of the towel, but still managed to dress in a pair of leggings and a t-shirt and place my arm in the sling which the hospital had provided. My reflection was vaporous in the bathroom mirror, barely visible through steam and opioids. I remembered that Kyoko had left me with strict instructions not to go anywhere. She had handed me a piece of paper with her phone number on it and said to call the moment I woke. I’d already disobeyed her in bathing and it had felt good. I decided to continue my resistance. My stomach’s persistent growl directed me to the bar fridge. On inspecting its interior, I discovered savoury rice balls and chewy sticky sweet ones filled with bean jam, all wrapped in plastic packets. I gobbled a few, chasing them with a cup of green tea, all the while sitting on the end of my bed, watching television. I flicked between bizarre game shows and what may have been soap op- eras, marvelling at the array of flamboyant hairstyles. Finally I picked up the phone beside the bed and dialled Kyoko’s number. Although she answered after a single ring, there was a lot of space between us over the phone. It wasn’t cold space, it was simply calm. She seemed in no hurry to impose directives this time. I told her I was in pain but that this was to be expected and she listened as if she was taking in every word as well as the gaps in between, just as she had the day I first told her about the insect. She shared how she and Michiko had been spending time together and that they’d felt good knowing I was safe in the hotel. Several tears of relief for our connection slid down my bruised face. However, just as I had begun to relax, she advised me to wait for her in my room and that shortly I would receive further instruc- tion. My tears evaporated, replaced by anger, for Kyoko’s unilateral organising style rankled. I was still here, still cooperating after everything that’d happened since I’d arrived in Japan, and yet she still wasn’t being transparent about what was going on. I had to consider that she still didn’t trust me enough to tell me, although I also suspected that if I challenged her, she’d try to peddle something pithy about the power of receptivity and graceful acceptance. I rolled my eyes while

64 watching a small cockroach scurry across the wall in the upper corner of the room. It disappeared behind the curtain as I hung up the phone. I spent the remainder of the day napping and obsessively flicking through television sta- tions, reminding myself of my father and his preoccupation with channel surfing. He could never settle on any one program and it seemed here in this hotel on Shikoku Island, I couldn’t either. At sundown, I gave up on the television and began staring at the cockroach instead. It moved this way and that, with no apparent goal. A twitch here and a twitch there of the antennae; what a life it seemed to lead. When the knock came on my door, I and the roach both froze. Another knock came and I wondered how it had come to live in what appeared to be quite a fancy hotel. Civilisation is an illusion! I almost shouted when a more insistent set of knocks came. Instead, I hoisted myself off the bed and opened the door to find the little trio of my new friends standing at the threshold. They bowed to me but I did not bother to return the pleasantry. ‘We’re sorry, were you busy?’ Kyoko asked. ‘Yes, I was watching a cockroach.’ I closed the door behind them and flopped back on the bed. I must have been peaking on the medication at that moment, as I wasn’t conscious of much pain. Michiko and Daisuke went over to the dining table in the corner of the room and began to unpack some bento boxes from a carry bag. Kyoko told me I was free to use room service if I liked, but that I might find it difficult ordering and besides, home-cooked food could be a comfort. I nodded in silence. The sight of them busying themselves in setting up my meal did feel in some ways like a consolation for my struggle. Daisuke carried a tray over to me once they were done, with boxes neatly spread over it. We looked at each other fleetingly and I had a strong urge to reach out and touch his face, to trace his eyebrows with my fingers. But I simply thanked him because I was annoyed with him too, for being part of their conspiracy. Suddenly I wanted them all to leave and as soon as they did, I tucked into the meal of fish, rice, vegetables, salad and miso soup. Afterwards, I raised myself from the bed and swung open the door to the balcony. The air was clear and cold, the ocean enigmatic. A glittering steely green, blackening as night came, it seemed to hold the might of a million dragons. I leaned against the balcony’s rail and inhaled deeply. Later, in the centre of the high soft bed, like some kind of princess with somewhat more than a pea to worry about, I slept restlessly.

65 The following morning as I finished dressing, I thought I heard the insect, bumping about. It crossed my mind that even though it had been giving me a rest during this period of recovery from the accident, it could’ve returned. But the sound, which was firm and certain, I realised when I heard it repeated, turned out to be someone knocking. Through the door, a voice chirped. ‘Housekeeping!’ ‘Please come back later!’ I called. ‘Okay!’ Came the reply. The interruption roused enough adrenalin in my system to motivate me to go for a walk. Yet the energy lasted only until I crossed the hotel’s threshold and stepped out onto the street. If it wasn’t enough that a bright flash of winter sunlight struck me in my eyes, I was assaulted by a profound sense of lethargy which weakened my legs and made them tremble ever so slightly. Despite the freshness of the air and the allure of wandering the streets of the island city, all I felt like doing was crawling back into bed. As a concession, I stopped in the lobby on my way back up. I needed new towels anyway and wished to allow the housekeepers the time to bring them to my room. From my velvety replica Louis XV seat, I watched a couple standing at the marble reception desk, neat in tailored clothing, nodding and smiling politely at the receptionist, while behind them, their children swung from a luggage trolley, squealing with delight. A bellhop sidled over to the children and advised them to cease their wild behaviour, I guessed, but they paid no heed, continuing to swing and then wheel each other around on the trolley. I watched as the bellhop tried to make eye contact with the receptionist to alert him to the bedlam that was unfolding behind the parents’ backs, but he was too deeply engaged in polite exchange with them to notice. I couldn’t help but be amused by the bellhop’s frustration and inability to control the children. Finally the parents turned around and herded the children outside. The bellhop strode immediately to the area where they’d been playing and began to polish a spot on the floor with a white cloth. My gaze followed the family to the area out front of the hotel. The children shimmied up the poles of another luggage trolley while their parents both stared at their cell phones. I closed my eyes for a while and thought about how I didn’t really want to be anywhere in the present world. It wasn’t that I wanted to die. I just wanted to be in a different world. I returned to my room. Tired of television, I just sat. And soon I became aware of an ancient glow which seemed to belong to the island. I sensed it guiding all of us, and like any intelligence, it had a shadow. There was no escaping this.

* 66 Over the next two days, Michiko, Kyoko and Daisuke brought me parcels of food to eat while I bored myself senseless again with absurd and surreally melodramatic television programmes, none of which I could understand. On the third day, I felt that I had enough energy to venture out again and wander about the town. This time making it over the threshold and beyond, I marvelled at the tiny grocery stores and bright manga shops. Fragrances of green tea, roasted sweet potatoes and chestnuts sold by street vendors who sang lilting jingles made my stomach rumble. With some of the money that I had left from the pilgrimage, I purchased snacks to eat: rice balls with pungent fish flakes inside them and sweet red bean desserts covered in chewy, sticky mochi. The salty air drew me to the docks where barges and ferries came in and departed, signalling with rude honking sounds. There appeared to be some construction going on there, perhaps the lengthening of the jetty. The construction workers wore rubber boots and voluminous white pants which billowed in the coastal wind. Sitting on a stone wall at the edge of the water, I observed a group of workers walk along the jetty together drinking cans of coffee, chatting and erupting in gales of laughter. I wanted so much to mingle among them without them noticing me. In fact, I wanted to be one of them, if only for a minute or an hour. The busyness and sense of industry at the docks was compelling for a while, but I grew tired of it and began to wander the suburban streets instead. The roads were narrow and undulating. Their houses were conjoined in compact neatness, each one different but still similar enough to be harmonious with the whole. It seemed like an ecosystem compared with the suburban streets of my home town, where quarter acre blocks and picket fences shouted “I’ve made it!” rather than “we’re in this together.” Old women swept their front steps with straw brooms and people on bicycles flew past and towards me, triggering fear in me at first, the wounds from my accident not even healed yet. But I soon realised that people were watchful. If I matched this with my own evenness, made no sudden movements and stayed focused on my surroundings, I would be alright. I found myself not far behind a boy or a young man, it was hard to tell. He walked on the balls of his feet, bringing the heels down last; a bouncy kind of gait which reminded me of Tomas’s. The fellow was dressed head to toe in black and stick insect thin, also like Tomas. I followed him because I had nothing else to do, and because a memory had hauled me through time to the morning that the sound of screaming had woken me.

67 Tomas had barricaded himself in his room. Despite our attempts at consoling him and cajoling him out, banging on both his door and darkened window, he’d screamed for much of the day. I hadn’t been able to understand how his voice had held out, but assumed that something from his vocal training, some diaphragmatic technique, was enabling him to continue howling beyond all reasonable borders of neighbourliness. Either that or he’d been possessed. Finally, the people next door must’ve phoned the authorities because the police came and broke down his door. Still he’d kept screaming and had also shoved a police officer. Because of this, they’d arrested him and detained him overnight in a cell. He’d come home quietly the next day, seething. After knocking back a row of tablets, several beers and a joint, he had told us the screaming was the only thing that had made him feel peaceful inside. The volume of the voices in his head had simply become too loud, and the things they’d said, too disturbing. His scream had drowned them out. Deep rumbling and very slight shifting beneath my feet jolted me back to Shikoku. A subterranean giant was stirring, shifting. The young man seemed unperturbed by the tremors and entered a convenience store. As its door slid open, a bell sounded and the customer service workers greeted him with an enthusiastic ‘irrashaimase!’ I waited out the front of the shop, watching him through the windows. Eventually, he walked out with a bag of goods in his hand. He noticed me looking at him and our eyes locked for an uncomfortably long time. I didn’t want to be the first to break away, because even more now, he reminded me of Tomas, particularly the expression of frozen inertia etched into his features. All the while we stared at each other, I heard clicking sounds and soft whispers. The earth continued to rumble. In the end, the young man won; I broke the eye contact first and the earth tremors ceased. I tried to look back at him, to catch his eyes again, but he was already walking away. Was he possessed, like Tomas? Like me? I looked around for someone else to follow, for the hell of it, but it was growing late, so I retreated to the hotel.

The following day, exhausted by the previous day’s adventures, I decided to stay in my room and rest. Mid-morning, the insect creature revealed itself in the liminal zone between waking and sleeping. ‘How do you keep finding me?’ I managed to formulate the words through an etheric sludge weighing upon my body. Even my jaw and voice box were suppressed by it.

68 ‘We always know where you are.’ Its message, spoken in unison by the mouths on its many heads — for it was in hydra form at that moment — occurred as a series of heavy objects, dropping from the mouths and weighing me down further. I woke fully in fright and considered calling home. Kyoko had given me a power adaptor so that I could charge my mobile phone. Switching it on, I was both relieved and perplexed to discover that I had no messages. Feeling the smallest flicker of an urge to call my father or Bron or Tomas, I thought about what I’d actually say to them. I didn’t want to leave, but I didn’t want to stay. I also ruminated on the possibility of fleeing to a large city, like Osaka or Tokyo, or any place where I could melt into the bright lights and swarms of people. However, in my injured state, the mere thought of hefting my bag on and off buses and trains made me wince. I would have to wait it out, it seemed. The following morning I awoke to the sound of rain and a ferocious wind. Outside my window, pine trees whipped about in a frenzied dance. I slowly dressed and soon after, Kyoko, Michiko and Daisuke arrived, each wrapped in wet weather gear. They also had with them their standard array of food parcels, but instead of leaving me in peace to eat as they usually did, they stood in a line beside the window. I lined the food containers up on the bed, sat down and tucked a napkin into my shirt. ‘Why are you still here?’ I finally asked, pointing at them with my chopsticks. Kyoko, business-like, scanned her eyes over my belongings, which were strewn on the backs of chairs, on the desk and on the floor. ‘After you finish eating, could you please pack your bag?’ ‘I can’t, really.’ I glanced down at my shoulder to remind her of my injury. Keen as I was for a change of scenery, I had already resolved that I would need more time to recover from the accident, before trudging off again onto the temple trail. ‘Oh, Magda. I am sorry. But you are feeling a little better now, aren’t you?’ She smiled. I rotated my shoulder with care. Surprisingly, I was capable of a great deal more movement than I’d been expecting. I looked at Kyoko, who nodded at Michiko and Daisuke. Despite the improvement in my shoulder, the three of them began retrieving items of my clothing from around the room and placing them on the bed. Daisuke began to fold each item reverently. I had never before witnessed such careful folding. Before my eyes, he appeared to be folding the chaos of the room into an elegant kind of submission. The look of the items laid out on the bed had the systematic beauty of a well designed city. I had to stifle a laugh when Michiko and Kyoko began stuffing the

69 items into the bag quite carelessly. Daisuke stared at them and I could tell he was disappointed. I made a small smile at him which he returned. As we filed out of the room, I took a last look at it. It seemed odd to have become attached to this hotel room when everything about it, its bland pastel shades and generic designs and patterns, discouraged sentimentality. The cockroach, which I felt both sickened and enamoured by, failed to poke its head out of its dark corner to witness my departure. I hoped it would at least find a crumb or two from my last meal to feast on. While Kyoko was checking me out at the reception desk, Michiko made a joke about the valets and porters being the hospitality industry’s equivalent of storm troopers. I was about to snaki- ly suggest she read Marx. Not that I believed his was the final word on class, but I felt defensive of the workers. ‘How do you feel about the emancipation of the working classes?’ I asked instead. As the words left my mouth, I realised my hypocrisy, for I too had smirked at the gaudiness of the valets’ and porters’ uniforms and their failures at taming wild children. ‘Ahh…well…’ she began, her words forming through a half sneer. ‘My parents were in Paris in 1968. They joined the wild cat strikes and threw Wilhelm Reich’s books at the police. I really don’t know how they managed to move back to Japan after that, it’s so oppressive here. I think they compartmentalise Paris as a ‘time in their lives’ which they try to incorporate into their art, sly- ly, you know? But their revolutionary books have been around the house my whole life and I’ve read most of them. Honestly, I don’t have too many feelings about the emancipation of the working classes on its own as an isolated condition of revolution. I am equally interested in ontology, I guess.’ ‘On what?’ I asked, but Kyoko began corralling us towards the door before she had a chance to answer. Once again, I found myself in the car beside Daisuke, who drove. We zipped along a snaking highway, the ocean on one side and cliff faces on the other, looking on us in wizened curiosity or hostility — it was hard to tell at the speed we travelled. The rain had settled, leaving fog to billow on the road ahead of us and at the edge of the sea. I was going to ask where we were, the name of the sea and the mountain range, but speaking required more energy than I was willing to expend. I’d seen some signs in English which had said Takamatsu, and that was enough for me, given I knew nothing about the island anyway. I angled the vanity mirror in the visor to observe the women in the back seat, just as I had the last time we’d all been in the car together. Neither noticed me watching them this time. 70 Michiko’s hair kept flicking into her eyes, blown by the wind through the partially open window. She patiently pushed it aside and continued to watch the scenery with the concentration of someone viewing an important documentary. Kyoko examined her pointed fingernails as though she was assessing their self-defence or screw-driving potential. I kept watch on Daisuke from the corner of my eye. His hands on the steering wheel were steady, yet relaxed. I imagined reaching and tracing my finger from the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, up his arm. He put the radio on, twisting its dial while keeping his eyes mostly to the road. Crackling static filled the otherwise silent car as he changed from station to station. I felt comforted by radio waves speaking the same tongue, no matter where I went. They tickled my skin and made me sigh softly. Daisuke glanced at me apologetically. I smiled, hoping to let him know that he had done nothing wrong. Talking aloud just seemed too much of an effort. He halted at a radio station which sounded similar to the one Kanda-san had put on when she’d picked us up from the airport. As before, a sombre narrator spoke about things I might have at one time been interested in. ‘The Japanese verb kumu refers to the process of crossing and interlacing materials. From the traditional Japanese architecture most often seen in shrines and temples, and the artistry of ku- miko-zaiku decorative latticework, to the braided kumihimo cords used to tie kimono sashes, and more, Japan is host to numerous designs based on this approach.’ The mention of shrines and temples reminded me of the pilgrimage and how little of it I had completed. I wondered if I would have another opportunity, although I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted one. The radio host continued to drone on the topic of kumu, drawing me into a liquid sleep.

The next thing I knew, Daisuke was gently shaking me awake. For the tiniest moment, I saw an image from outside of myself, of me asleep with my mouth hanging open. ‘We’ve arrived,’ he said. In a moment of collective deja-vu, the four of us stood in a little cluster out the front of a hotel, only this one was much older than the one I’d been convalescing in. It was growing dark by this stage, but I was still able to see that it was the only building in sight. Its style was square and Brutalist and somewhere along the line, someone must have had the idea to paint it a gaudy flamin- go colour. Surrounded by cypresses and rural land, it seemed a kind of forgotten pink palace.

71 I walked along beside Daisuke as we all made our way towards the building. Even without touching, our bodies felt harmonious together, like two fibres in the same rope, twining, strengthen- ing. I turned to look at Michiko and Kyoko, who were beaming at me. ‘What?’ I mouthed the question, but their grins only widened in reply. We neared the glass front doors of the hotel. Two women sat just inside, cross-legged on tatami. Rising in unison, they each opened a door for us. Kyoko introduced Michiko and I to Mie and Akemi, who embraced us each gently. Akemi pointed out four pairs of slippers in a neat line on the floor for us all to swap with our shoes, while Mie spoke in Japanese into a walkie-talkie. After changing our shoes, we continued to stand around in the lobby making small talk. I shivered, not because I was cold, for the room was well heated. It was more that I felt small bolts of electrical anticipation passing along my spine and up and down my limbs. It was the walkie talkie more than anything else which suddenly made me feel as if I was part of an operation, rather than just some kind of cross-cultural social gathering. I brought my fingers to the scab on my temple and found that it had shrunk considerably. My shoulder, too, was feeling almost back to normal, helping me to feel ready for whatever was ahead of me. I strayed from the group and wandered deeper into the building to the heart of the lobby. Its furnishings, like the building’s exterior, seemed to be from another time, frozen in amber. Shag car- peting, voluptuous lamps and bold-patterned sofas all competed for my attention, a brazen opera of hues unsubdued even by the layers of dust which coated everything. I was sure I could hear the tin- kling of cocktail glasses and laughter and smell the traces of cigarettes and hors d’oeuvres just beyond my senses; a postcard from a dead time. I ran my fingers along velvety cream and gold wall- paper and stared up into an enormous chandelier hanging from the ceiling. It was like a queer spaceship and I felt any moment I could be sucked up into its glittering centre. I sank into one of the many psychedelic sofas and didn’t notice the reverie I’d entered until it was interrupted by laughter. Another person had joined the group near the door. Kyoko waved me over and I reluctantly raised myself from the sofa. The handsome newcomer introduced himself as Yoshi. He wore his hair in a high pony tail that dropped to his waist like a silk sash. His face split into an infectious smile when we greeted each other. A warmth emanated from him and yet I felt he was laughing at me, but I couldn’t be sure. He spoke to the others in Japanese and I noticed also in his tone a certain formidability. I imagined saying to him, ‘Yoshi, you seem okay, but I can’t be bothered with your complexity at the moment.’ It felt good just saying it in my mind.

72 He led our party up several flights of carpeted stairs, all the while making what I guessed was polite chit-chat with Kyoko. The gentle rhythmic words they exchanged and their occasional titters echoed through the stairwell as we climbed. We reached the third floor and followed Yoshi down a corridor. He pointed out bathrooms to the right and left and finally opened a door onto a very large room, perhaps equivalent in size to at least ten of the rooms I had been staying in at the previous hotel. The windows were covered with simple blinds and the light was dim. Candlelight, it seemed, although I couldn’t see its source at first. Beneath our feet were rectangles of tatami flooring, its sweet fresh smell and springiness charging me with nostalgia for my pilgrimage’s temple accommodation. Soon my eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness and I could make out some fifteen people sitting or lying on futons around the room. It seemed as if everybody breathed in unison, as every now and then I thought I heard the softest communal inhalation and exhalation. And I felt my own breath change, as though it was trying to synchronise with something larger than its usual pattern. The only other sound was someone languidly beating a drum. The spaces between the beats must have gone on for at least ten seconds. They were so long, they made me forget there was a beat until another one came. It was strange and hypnotic, both relaxing and unsettling at once. Indeed, even though the scene was calm, I couldn’t ignore a swelling sense of anticipation, for why was I there? I had no clear idea. Yoshi showed me to a vacant futon. Daisuke had found one already, a few places away from me. I looked over to him, our eyes finding each other in the half light. For the tiniest second I felt him, as though our skins were touching. We broke contact and I watched Michiko tuck herself into the futon beside me. She was out within moments, snoring softly. My awareness of the others in the room, despite their apparent stillness, prevented my own sleep for a while, and I shifted around in my bed in discomfort, waiting for the drum beat, in between pregnant pauses. I must’ve fallen into some kind of slumber which plunged me deep at first, only later to wash me up in a halfway zone in the dead of night. There, in a dimension slightly to the side of that room lit by candles, I felt a crawling sensation all over my skin, but I had no ability to move; I was suspended in an etheric jelly again. The insect being was obviously here with me now. But this time, oddly, my encounter with it was almost banal, as though we each knew the drill and went through the motions of it, without the extremes of my sense of shock and terror. I woke groggily at first light to a room cast in grey tones. All around me, the others lay prone, the odd snore escaping through lips flaccid with sleep. I drifted back into my own deep sleep riddled with abstruse dreams. Nothing about them made any sense. 73 I woke fully to the sounds of whispers and people moving about the room. I watched as Michiko padded to the centre where Kyoko, Yoshi, Mie and Akemi kneeled in a small circle. They seemed to be in some kind of quiet sitting exercise and Michiko joined them. I watched as over the course of five or ten minutes, one by one, others in the room also joined them and the circle expanded. I had never before been able to sit still, the chatter and pictures in my mind too bright and too loud. Even physically it felt too much of a struggle as my body would ache or tell me it needed to shift, twitch or shake. Stillness seemed to require another kind of energy I simply did not have. So I resisted their circle and instead went to the bathroom. Its tiles were peach coloured and the walls above them were painted a warm grey. The toilets were western style and each cubicle contained a pair of special toilet slippers. Beside the hand dryer was a framed ink drawing of an earwig standing on a log, its rear end pointed to the sky. The strangeness of the image made me chuckle. What is this place? I asked no-one and chose a shower stall. ‘Fuck,’ I whispered to myself when I returned to the large room after my shower and found them all still sitting. My expletive attracted glances from several of the people in the circle. I ramped it up with an even louder huffing sound and bent down to pretend to sort out my bag. It was true that Michiko and Kyoko had packed it very badly, but I pretended to be more annoyed about it than I actually was to avoid sitting with them. I knew what my own game was, but that didn’t mean I could stop it. I kept muttering and unfolded a few items and refolded them, to fill time. Eventually, it seemed I couldn’t delay any further and I gave in to the part of myself that really did want to experience the quietness the others were in. No-one even looked up as I joined the circle, for they all seemed by this stage deep in their own experience. I tried to sit. Restlessly, I tried. After much mental chaos, boredom, wriggling and repositioning myself, everything became still. Then, not even a second later, Mie broke the silence. She spoke a few sentences in Japanese and then in English. ‘Hello and thank you all for being here. It has been a long and strenuous journey for many of you, a sort of leap of faith too, as many of you do not even know why you are here.’ I looked at Kyoko, whose mouth made a tiny smile. Of course she knew why we were here. This had seemed to be her cue, as she cleared her throat and spoke, like Mie, first in Japanese, then English. ‘Indeed, many of you must be wondering why you are here?’ At this point, I felt energy in my legs and in my feet. I looked towards the door. ‘Some of you may still wish to leave. And so I offer you the opportunity now, to go once and for all. It must come down to your will and what is right for you in your own being. None of us

74 here can tell anyone else what they need. We can help you get to an airport or bus if that is what you wish to do.’ At this point, I could no longer hold my silence. ‘How can we decide if we don’t know what is going to happen? At no point has there been informed consent to this process, if that is what it is? At every point I have been asked to trust. And I have, and found myself in a hospital! What’ve you to say about this!?’ My voice shook, my face flushed and I felt prickles of sweat in my underarms, in the heat of everyone’s gaze. Several people nodded in support of my questions. Now Michiko spoke up. ‘Magda, we are so very glad you are speaking up and so extremely sorry about your accident. That was not in any way part of our intention. And we did give you an opportunity to leave from the hospital. We would’ve happily flown you home. And yet, you are still here.’ She was right. I ducked my head. “But then my anger rose again. ‘Okay, yes, I chose to remain here. I liked the pattern on the fabric that you wiped your face with!’ I said indignantly. I watched as Kyoko and Yoshi exchanged glances. Yoshi’s face twitched like he wanted to laugh. ‘But I am so tired of all the secrecy! I have been living with the mystery of being assailed and fed on for much of my life by an otherworldly insect. I was attacked by the creature again last night, and even though it was not as traumatic as usual, I should not have to deal with this at all. You said I would have the opportunity to change! Yet everything has been shrouded in tricks, accidents and mysteries!’ I looked around at the others in the circle. Several of them murmured that they too were fed up and exhausted by their nightly insect attacks. Yoshi cleared his throat, speaking first in Japanese and then in halting English. ‘It is important that you mention mystery. For you are now, if you want it, to be initiated into an ancient insectoid mystery school. Yes, we are also emerging, just as you are, but we have at our disposal some Adepts, who are soon to arrive. We are sorry for the waiting, but soon things will be clearer.’ Insectoid mystery school! I had to laugh. I scanned others in the circle to see if anyone else was tickled as I was, but everyone looked very serious, even Daisuke. I looked again and realised that Michiko’s eyes sparkled and a smile played at her lips. There was a small commotion at the door. Kyoko and Akemi rose and went to welcome the cluster of elderly people in white robes who were entering the room. They reminded me of Ohenro pilgrims — so tiny that when they bowed, they seemed almost to disappear altogether. One used a walking stick to support herself and the others trod across the tatami to where we sat. They lowered themselves to the floor and joined the circle.

75 Thoughts flew in and out of my head faster than I could process them. I felt desperate for a clue or a tip of some sort about how to handle the strangeness of what was happening, yet watching the others was useless. Even Daisuke’s expression was neutral now. I wanted to see his dimple and his lovely overbite one more time, before I decided whether to engage with whatever was about to happen. One of the elderly women nodded her head at Kyoko, who spoke. ‘We welcome twelve Ipsissima from the Order of Our Lady Cicada.’ At this, the twelve Ip- sissima bowed their heads. I wasn’t about to fight the collective on this one and bowed back with everyone else. This seemed to signal Kyoko to rise from the circle. She walked to a corner of the room, which up until that moment, I had paid little heed to. Now I could see it contained a small altar with various artefacts on it. One of them was a gong, which she sounded. It reverberated for a moment and dissolved again. Then she picked up a dark blue earthenware bowl from the altar and cradling it carefully in her hands, she returned to the circle. At this, the Ipsissima all stood again and gestured for us to follow. The one who had nodded her head at Kyoko brought her hands to her face; forming a diamond with her index fingers and thumbs, she placed it between her eyes, the points of her fingers touching her hairline. She held this gesture for a moment, before clapping her hands twice, bowing twice and clapping once again. The others did the same after her. Next, they all began chanting in unison in Japanese. I thought I recognised the words; it sounded like the Heart Sutra from the Ohenro pilgrimage. But then something else was added, another sutra perhaps, or an invocation or incantation of sorts. It went on for some time and I noticed myself becoming very still and meditative, in spite of another part of myself; a more resistant one. If this was a cult, I reasoned, it was a relatively harmless one. The chanting stopped and everyone sat once again. ‘Now, this bowl,’ Kyoko spoke, holding a blue glazed earthenware bowl aloft. ‘Inside is a spirit plant that has been consumed for millennia by ancient peoples in Japan. There has been a recent consensus decision taken by plant, animal and ancient ancestral allies as well as all Ipsissima and initiates of the Order, to open to new insectoid human initiates. So we have brought you all here to share in it. Please join us in the next rite of initiation.’ She handed the bowl to the first Ipsissimus. She drank from it delicately and handed it to the Ipsissimus next to her, who did the same and handed it to the initiate beside her. One by one, everyone followed suit. When the bowl came to the woman beside me, I glanced inside it before she raised it to her mouth. It contained a silvery brown liquid. For the briefest moment, I noticed a long proboscis extend from where the woman’s mouth should’ve been. It appeared to suck the brown 76 liquid as though through a straw. I blinked, incredulous at what I was seeing. On second glance, the proboscis had vanished. I watched her swallow, grimace and pass the bowl to me. I held it for a moment in my hand, swishing it around. It did not look at all appealing, yet I raised it to my mouth and swallowed a small amount. It was bitter and sent a small shiver along my spine as it slipped down my throat. Surprised that I did not gag, I quickly passed it to Michiko, who sat beside me. Once the bowl had gone around the circle, the Ipsissima raised themselves to standing positions, bowed to the circle and made their way out the door. Next, Kyoko instructed us to return to our beds and lie down. She said they would bring us more of the plant sacrament every hour for the following twelve hours. Despite my skepticism, I was willing to try anything that might help me with the insect situation. It was time to do whatever I could to put a stop to being drained of my life-force by that creature. Lying on my back on my futon beside Michiko, I stared at the white wall above my head. Before long, I began to notice warmth and tingling inside my body. I followed the warm currents as they moved around my limbs and trunk, delighting in the sensuality of the feeling. I raised my hand in front of my eyes to see if my perception was altered in any way, but it appeared as it usually did. And just as I decided that it was merely a somatic experience with no visual phenomena, the pictures started. Small marks on the ceiling hinted at the forms of eyes and legs. Rip- ples of light were wings. The bodies of insects were in my peripheral vision, but as soon as I’d look directly at them, they’d melt back into the walls. Sounds passed through my head, too. Questions, comments, whispers, moans. Buzzing, clicking, whizzing, tintinnabulation. I noticed that Yoshi sat by the altar, occasionally burning an incense stick or tending to a sputtering candle flame. Soon Kyoko was beside him. Their bodies moved together at the altar like two parts of a machine. For a moment, it appeared that they each had silvery filigree wings, resting against their shoulders. Then these too vanished. I watched Kyoko dip a ladle into a large crock pot and place more liquid into the blue bowl. She stood and brought it around to each of us who lay on the floor. The next sip I took made me belch. With that, the visions became deeper and richer, no longer like hazy apparitions, but holo- grams that I could almost grab hold of. The soundtrack also seemed to turn up several notches. More chatty cacophany, more chaos. I looked around at the others on their futons and everybody else too seemed enthralled by the show on the ceiling. Insects were congregating, mating, cocoon- ing. After the third dose, my mind began to protest. I felt myself being pulled into a paranoid thought spiral. The more I tried to stop it, the worse it got. I need more sacrament! I willed Kyoko. 77 Please, no more sacrament! Another part of me begged. And yet I had a heightened awareness of these thoughts being not mine. They were only thoughts. In which case, whose were they? Or what were they? Before I could ruminate further on this, Kyoko was by my side once again, offering me the bowl. I sat up, leaning on my elbow and drank. This time my own furry straw extended from my mouth to meet the silvery brown substance. Drinking through my proboscis enabled me to guzzle a little too easily. I took far more than a sip. Lying down flat on my back again, the heaviest in my body I had ever felt in my life, it was not long before a whirring, buzzing sound started up in my ears, and distant drum beats, fast and regular. Eventually the buzzing sound drowned out every other sound. It was as though it was the only sound in the world. And the insects were bigger now, perhaps the size of my hands. I began to think of them as my friends, yet this also seemed a specious proposition. They’re not your friends, a voice commanded. I was too gone by this stage to determine where or who the voice came from. I continued to drink from the bowl through the day and night, as did the others in the room. Occasionally someone would sit up and purge into one of the buckets that had been placed at the end of our futons. Each time it would make me more aware of the others; that each person was un- dergoing their own adventure, of which I knew nothing. And then the voice of a child tentatively trying new sounds and words emerged. She stuttered, lisping nonsense, but I felt compelled to listen.

Backstrap Sat Fat Robinson Baxter Blotter Rock Stop Block Hop Marmalade Johnson Half Cap Home Hat Flat Chop Smash Bat Ginger Cat Flap Hobson Bronson Naff Slap Martin

And so on and so forth. Parts of me were equally tickled and frustrated that I could make no meaning or narrative of this arrangement of words and names, much as I tried. I listened to them nonetheless, my mind completely boggled. Until very gradually, an ominous feeling began to encroach on my experience.

78 It was here. I just knew it. With a final Nap Lap Otterson, the child’s words faded and the giant insect being materialised. Now, instead of revealing itself as shadowy impressions or water- marks in my peripheral vision, the insect was more real than ever before. Its limbs were sinewy and shone in the candlelight. Its eyes were prominent, bulging and set wide apart. The wings which sprouted from its golden-green exoskeleton were stretched tight, membranous. Shimmering, it hov- ered over me. I lay still, in both in admiration and stone cold terror at once. ‘Hello Magda,’ it uttered, breaking the silence. ‘What do you want?’ I managed to yell in such a way that only it could hear. At this it threw back its head and laughed. ‘What is so funny?’ I demanded. But again, I faced a wall of silence. Waiting for an answer became a stricture in which I felt wrapped. Eventually, I grew bored with this tension and the disquiet. Annoyed with the insect, I began to think about Daisuke instead, and whether I might ever hold his hand or kiss his face. Because of this I was startled, painfully so, when the insect finally roared: ‘You know what I want!’ In response I gulped several large breaths and unloaded a magazine of rapid-fire questions. ‘Do you want to hurt me? Do you want to steal my energy? Do you want to punish me?’ Each of my queries was animated by a question mark which materialised in the space between us. They resembled silver hooks which floated away before doubling back and attaching themselves to the scaly torso of the insect, who flinched as each one pierced its body. When its shiny black eyes started morphing, at first I thought I was imagining things. Little by little, like coral bleaching in sunlight, they changed through shades of dark to lighter brown, eventually settling on a deep red hue. At this point it began to shake, and I had to wonder, was it enraged by my insolence? Had I, in my growing strength or stupidity, provoked it to end things once and for all? Or would it spare me? All bets were off. I turned to look at Michiko who lay on the futon beside me. Her expression was pained. Several tears slid down her cheeks. I supposed it would be wrong to call on her when she was in her own moment of difficulty or possible release. But I did it anyway. ‘Michiko! Help me!’ I hissed. She turned to look at me and something transferred between the two of us that I couldn’t have named if I’d have tried. It was more than understanding, more than silent mutual compassion. Feeling fortified by this unspeakable connection, I managed to return my attention to the insect. Still trembling, its bright red eyes flashing like soundless sirens, it dribbled a slick of saliva from its proboscis onto my bare foot. A sick panic began to swell in my stomach but I refused to energise it. Instead, I waited and watched as the insect’s trembling became more violent, like a 79 seizure. Its metallic limbs clanged together like eight sets of cymbals played discordantly for an art noise experiment. Torrents of silver tears began streaming from its ruby eyes and great rasping sobs wrenched from its chest. Tears dripped down its face to the floor, forming puddles of mercury. Over its wails, I could hear the sounds of the mercury lapping at the walls. My futon left the floor and looking over its edge, I realised I was afloat in the creature’s wretchedness. Was this another trick? I couldn’t be sure. But as I watched, a crack formed in its chest. This grew into a large split revealing its heart which also began to break open before my eyes like a ripe pomegranate, thousands of tiny beads of crimson plopping into the waves of silver. ‘Are you sad?’ I demanded, as I bobbed up and down in its tears. It nodded. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for it, but only to a point, for its display bordered on maudlin. ‘Why?’ I asked, softer now. And then the insect formed words which were not language in the usual sense. They came in rhythms, colours, emotions and energies that I could read. It said with no actual words: ‘I made you to remind me, and I’ve been here so you’d forget. And we are sorry.’ And in a flash of blinding light the entire experience imploded. My futon hit the floor with a whump. Then, once again without words or pictures or sounds, I was made aware that the insect and I were never not one and the same. I lay in complete stillness and emptiness. Time ceased to be a thing. But eventually, into the abyss entered a kind of soft howling sound, like wind whistling through a petrified tree. I had never heard a person make such a sound. Somehow I knew it was Daisuke. I held him in my heart until he became quiet again. Then I must’ve slept.

I woke to what I thought was the sound of cicadas singing rhythmically in the bush. I groaned, wondering, when does this end? I soon realised it was Akemi walking around the room, beating and shaking a rattle drum. She sounded it at the foot of every bed, causing everybody to stir and make small noises of protest. I raised myself to my feet and shuffled to the bathroom. My body felt lead- en, like I was wading though molasses. When I returned to the room, the futons were being carried one by one by Yoshi, Kyoko, Mie and Akemi and placed in a pile in a corner of the room.

80 I looked around at the other initiates. They looked like I felt — tired and bewildered with the heavy melting sensation that the sacrament seemed to impart. Had they also met their tormen- tors? ‘And now we dance!’ Mie announced as she straightened the last futon on the pile and began to press some buttons on a stereo that sat on the floor. ‘Nani? What? Dance?’ I heard words mumbled in Japanese and English. And then the music started up. A rainbow of sound exploded from the stereo, for hours, it seemed. Everything from lighter, sillier songs, to driving bass heavy beats to soft verdant heavenly sounds. Kyoko, Mie, Akemi and Yoshi danced around us with drums and rattles, while we attempted to move. At first it seemed as if I could barely manage much more than a shuffle around the room. But the relentlessness of the music seemed eventually to animate all of us. Little by little, our shuffling transformed to cohesive movements and the odd vocal whoop told me some of them were even happy. The last piece was one of the more gentle tracks, but still with a bass line that had a distinct groove, sufficient to cause me to move around the room in a sense of unity with the sound and with myself. At the song’s completion, in the silence that followed, everybody began bowing at one another, and I joined in, as it seemed the most elegant way I’d ever seen to honour a music set and a dance. After Akemi and Yoshi and some of the others replaced the futons on the floor, we all dropped to them, sweating and spent. A deep and dreamless sleep followed.

The next morning, a buffet of soba noodles, broth, vegetables, fresh fruit and tea was spread on a low table at the centre of the room. As we gathered around and began to eat, Kyoko spoke to us about how we were still bound to be affected by the sacrament and so it was better to delay speaking about our experience, to hold our silence for a little longer. The quiet which followed felt like a warm embrace. I seemed to have no further need to hide behind the mental chaos, from the pure and wrenching pain that was in my heart. I could just feel it. At the same time, I was deeply connected with my fellow beings. Everything felt divine and difficult all at once. I felt rattled but somehow, it was a relief. After we finished eating, Mie and Yoshi handed out pieces of paper and pens. Once everyone had one of each, they told us to write down what our intention had been before we began our respective adventures, what we had hoped to transform. I recalled voicing mine at the beach and 81 how straight afterwards, Kyoko had produced an envelope with the same words already written within. Nothing made sense. I shook my head and recreated the intention on paper: to know when to trust and when not to trust. And to become who I really am. After this, Kyoko told us that fresh towels awaited us in the bathrooms and that we could shower if we felt like it. Gratefully, I made a dash for the bathroom and stood in the shower, delighting in the rivulets of warm water which ran down my body. After drying myself off, I rummaged through my bag to find something clean to put on. The only thing that I had not yet worn was the light green cocktail dress with the bronze tint which I had packed on a whim. It seemed the perfect thing to wear, less for its pencil skirt and classic elbow length sleeves, but more for its colour and its fit, which held to my body like a second skin, or an exoskeleton of a sort.

I flew on a public plane from Tokushima to the airport at Osaka, where I embarked on an international flight homewards. I watched anodyne inflight entertainment, ate processed airplane snacks and tried my very best to be inconspicuous. As we touched down, I thought about Kyoko’s words on my departure, that soon I wouldn’t need a plane at all. I’d laughed, but on scrutinising her, I’d realised there was not a twinge of irony in her expression.

It was eleven o’clock at night when I rummaged for the key beneath the bromeliad pot at the side door of my father’s place. A pair of dusty tennis shoes and a fluorescent green chewed up tennis ball languished on the doormat. I could see every molecule of dog spit on the ball, glimmering like dia- monds in the moonlight. Once I’d let myself in, Anubis was at my feet greeting me with yips and sniffs. Dropping to my knees, I buried my face in his coat. I was murmuring into his ear, when my father entered the hallway, remote control in hand. ‘Magda!’ he gasped in surprise. ‘Dad!’ I mirrored his exclamation, smiling. ‘Where’ve you been?’ He shouted this, opening his palm to the sky. I remained quiet, still undecided about how much to tell him. ‘Those fellows you live with have been calling. I didn’t 82 know what to tell them. I thought you’d be fine…But…You didn’t ring, you didn’t write. Where did you go?’ ‘Blazing Swan.’ ‘Who??’ he demanded, cupping a hand to his ear. ‘It’s a festival,’ I replied, free-styling now, knowing it wouldn’t matter what I said, as he considered all of my activities strange and abject. ‘Hokay!’ he replied, parodying both me and his own confusion by using the accent of our people who’d arrived with no clue as to the local customs. I laughed and realised he couldn’t see my process — my becoming. Until he could, it would be very hard to tell him about what had happened. ‘Well, are you staying?’ he asked, while examining the remote control in his hand as if confused about how it came to be there. I told him I was. He demanded I follow him to the hallway cupboard, from which he pulled down blankets and piled them into my arms. It wasn’t cold but I accepted them wordlessly. He still hadn’t seemed to notice anything different about me, but that was really fine. I didn’t need him to. It would be for the best if we kept conversation light and brief. After I’d dumped the blankets on the bed, we chatted over a cup of tea and a piece of cake, about his garden, about Anubis digging too many holes, about the neighbours’ renovations. Before long, he stretched and yawned and told me to go to bed. Although my father had redone my old room for guests, he’d never removed the lumines- cent star stickers I’d placed on the ceiling as a child. My recreation of constellations and galaxies — the Saucepan, the Seven Sisters, and a half-baked attempt at the Milky Way — winked down at me. I had precious few thoughts of what to do next, only that the following day, I would go to Bron and Tomas.

I told the boys most of it — the island, my new friends, the pilgrimage, the accident — but I left out the initiation. Something told me they were not yet quite ready to hear about that part. I needed to hear more about the fire first. This was most pressing. We sat on a bench and in the lamp and moonlight I watched Bron roll a crooked cigarette from the last dregs in his pouch while Tomas cracked his knuckles. They said that their first gasping inhalations in the night, as they’d stumbled from the burning building, had given them both a new 83 appreciation for air itself. Inhalation and the will to survive had made them both electrically high. They’d also been glad I hadn’t been there, because the tree which had fallen on the house and had started the fire, had smashed through the ceiling right onto my bed. I wasn’t keen to think too much about what would’ve happened, had I been there still. The renewed sense of inspiration that they’d both had at first, of luck and of grace and of some kind of shimmering Phoenix-like rebirth, hadn’t lasted long. For Bron, the feeling had washed down the drain along with the ash that he’d scrubbed from his hair at the beach showers the morning after the fire. His deep and vicious melancholia had metastasised, because now he was homeless on top of everything else. It’d taken Tomas a little longer to come down from his post-fire rush. Three days, to be precise. The catalyst had come during a music session at a friend’s place, with the realisation that he could only jam with a voice still raspy from smoke inhalation, his guitar now ash, blowing on the hot wind out to sea. They both admitted they’d been lucky to find a place to stay in an artists’ cooperative in an industrial estate not far from the ruins of our old place. There, they’d been trading handy work in the space for a spot to roll out borrowed swags on the floor and use of the common areas. Tomas was a dab hand at carpentry, having begun an apprenticeship with his father building cabinets and furniture some years previously, before they’d had a blow-out and had stopped speaking. Fortunate- ly, he’d retained enough skills to be able to contribute to the construction of a mezzanine which some of the warehouse residents had been working on. Bron was something of a green thumb, having grown numerous marijuana crops over multiple seasons. This had made him useful to the co-op’s permaculture garden, where he weeded and pulled up vegetables for the communal stews and some extra, which were donated to the environment centre for the weekly soup kitchen. He’d even given them suggestions on how to deal with a previously unseen species of aphid, a way to redirect them using a combination of several herbs. The people of the co-operative had been grateful and the work and sense of community had kept Bron’s and Tomas’s days full of meaning for a few weeks after the fire. But at some point, when itchy boredom infected them, they’d attempted to soothe it with nightly ventures into the tiled stinking brown folds of local pubs until last drinks, or into the lounge rooms of various dealers. Soon, their emergency government payments vanished. Of the two, Bron had maintained a veneer of stability for longer, being of slightly hardier constitution than Tomas, and with greater fiscal sense. But all in all, it had been only a matter of weeks before their arrangement with the co-op had ruptured due to their scattered highs, debilitating comedowns and the end-

84 less bickering between them. Although they had had several allies who could forgive and understand their behaviours, most others in the co-op had felt they were undermining the space. Tomas’s face was slack with weariness, Bron's tight with anger. I wasn’t sure what to say to either of them. My own way of coping with living with them, when I’d discovered red bills and threatening letters from the landlord down the side of the fridge, decorated with coffee cup rings and strange occult symbols, had been to try not to care. The mayhem had been challenging, to be sure, but in some ways it also reflected perfectly my own chaos. Especially as at that time, the insect was in full assault mode, striking every few nights and drinking my life-force down at the same rate Bron and Tomas sucked back boxes of beer, wine, tablets and rocks. And of course, earplugs had always helped. But it seemed like too little too late to suggest my old coping strategies to the co-op people. And besides that, I knew that now, I too, would decline to live with the boys, should the opportunity arise. Not with them carrying on the way they did. My meeting with the two of them on the very day they had been evicted presented a meaningful coincidence. I thought about the way that Kyoko had dealt with me, when she found me washed up in the beach bathrooms desperate for something to change. I searched their faces for clues while we sat, to see if they too carried the crystalline blood of insects. Neither could believe that someone had paid for me to travel to Japan. Bron was particularly doubtful that anyone would do that for nothing. ‘Did you have to, you know, hostess for Japanese businessmen in exchange?’ He made the signal with his fingers for quotation marks around the word “hostess.” ‘Nuh.’ I shook my head. ‘Or teach English to little brats?’ Tomas ribbed. ‘Uh uh,’ I replied, my eye catching a dragonfly which danced over his head. I couldn’t understand how it was still awake, as it was night-time now. ‘You sure you never woke up over there, real heavy-headed with the distinct sense but no actual proof, that you had been violated?’ Bron refused to drop it. It was an arresting question and I remembered how I’d felt during the ceremony — heavy bodied, and possibly in some ways violated, by the sacrament. But actually, it’d seemed more like a returning of something that had been taken from me. It had actually been the opposite of violation, as well as something else which was inexpressible. I shook my head and remained silent, wondering if the right words would come, while also prepared for them not to. ‘You look different!’ I realised Bron was staring at me. 85 ‘Do I?’ I circled the fuzz at the apple of my cheek with my fingertips, to see if I could feel from the outside how he was seeing me. The way I felt from the inside was interesting, but my hunger or sense of obligation to articulate it, even to myself had all but vanished. With narrowed eyes, Bron continued to study me, even more intently now it seemed. I noticed the subtle jutting of his elbow into Tomas’s side. ‘She does look different, doesn’t she?’ Tomas murmured, pushing a scruffy lock of hair from his face. ‘It’s partly the eyes, but it’s something else too.’ ‘It’s scary actually.’ ‘Yeah… a bit alien! What did they do to her over there?’ They continued discussing me, as though I wasn’t there, while I remained silent. I looked down at my phone to check the time and at that moment Tomas spluttered, ‘She looks like an insect!!’ He’d seen me. I attempted a smile, but it seemed to do nothing to comfort them. ‘Yes, so true! But it keeps coming and going. It’s like she’s morphing.’ Bron shook his head and frowned. I laughed in an exaggerated sort of way, feeling that I was in the zoo or a sideshow alley. ‘Oh my god, she’s laughing. Is it funny? S’pose it is. You went away and became like a… like…an insect!’ Tomas flapped his hands as spoke, insectoid too. I saw it. ‘Well, now that you’re talking to me, not about me, I will say, it’s cool that you can see it, because….’ I faltered. How could I tell them I actually was an insect? That really, I had always been. What would they do with this knowledge about me? Would they be too frightened to remain my friends? My thoughts had begun to spiral again, way too quickly, triggering nervousness and a sadness in my heart. Or had the feelings prompted the thoughts? It was all too close, too enmeshed for me to be able to work it out. Then words came, and I almost believed them. ‘Hey! Don’t worry. It’s all good!’ I hazarded another smile, only half way this time, which started me wondering how my mouth appeared to them. Were they seeing the long straw which extended from my jaw, rather than my usual pinkish brown lips? I licked them as they felt suddenly very dry. ‘It is the eyes, mostly…but….’ Bron stopped and I knew what was coming next. ‘Yeah, that and the long thing coming out of your mouth!’ Tomas almost shouted. Small beads of sweat had formed above his lip, which glistened in the park lamplight. I watched him wipe them away with his knuckles. 86 ‘Oh yes, that,’ I half-whispered, bringing my hand to my face and running it along the outline of the proboscis which protruded from my mouth and nose area. It felt both fuzzy and firm at once. ‘The long thing; it’s fading in and out. What are you doing to reality? What the fuck, Mag- da?’ Tomas’s voice broke slightly in his fright. ‘Yeah. What the actual fuck?’ Bron somehow seemed both angry and amused at the same time. ‘Well, so, I haven’t told you yet about the last bit of my trip away.’ The boys exchanged sideward glances. ‘Oh, I know!’ Bron seemed almost triumphant. ‘You are one of those sorta white, sorta not, shit-cunts who’s plundered the foreign Other to find their higher self! Only, your higher self is an insect! That’s fuckin’ funny, Magda! You’re a pisser.’ Bron slapped his thigh and guffawed. Tomas, however, was quiet. He just watched me, and ever so slightly, he twitched.

After a quick meal at the environment centre, Bron, Tomas and I went to the same hostel that Kyoko had stayed in when I’d first met her. The colour of the walls was still jarring to my eyes, but I didn’t take it personally. I stretched out on one of the beds and listened to Tomas and Bron who gossiped about a white pseudo-shaman they’d heard about through friends. He’d been jailed for fraud and was spray- ing all manner of narcissistic threats and psychotic hexes upon certain members of his community, mainly those who’d walked away from his control. Bored of their story after a while, I sent a message to Kyoko. After some back and forth, she agreed to help my friends come to Japan. All I had to do was commit to a time to meet the driver at the beach, and assure her that we would be there, packed and ready to go.

I woke the next morning and saw Bron crouched down tying his shoelaces. I rubbed sleep from my eyes and watched as he slung his bag on his shoulders and opened the door. Before stepping out, he glanced back and we locked eyes. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked, sitting up on my elbow. 87 ‘Sorry, Magda. I’m not going to do this with you.’ ‘It’s okay, you don’t need to apologise to me.’ But he mustn’t have believed me that I didn’t mind, as he launched into a whispered diatribe about how the Order sounded like a cult, trying to suck people in. He said he would hitchhike up the coast and look for some fruit-picking work instead. To this I could only shrug and wish him well. Tomas woke soon after Bron left, fizzing with excitement. It was the first time I’d ever seen him smile before drinking coffee. While I was showering, it occurred to me that I ought to tell him that what lay ahead might be hard at times and that he might have to confront things on Shikoku that could be excruciating. But then again, what could I know of his experience in advance? It was his to have, after all. After my shower, I found him in front of the mirror attempting to comb his hair. ‘Do you think that’s going to help you?’ I teased, remembering how I had fussed far too much over packing my bag the day I’d left. He flopped back onto the one of the beds and began to look at his phone. ‘Do you think that’s going to help you?’ I screeched and leapt on top of him, pinning down his arms with my knees. We began to wrestle, laughing and making faux death threats to one another. He had me in a playful headlock, when my phone rang. ‘I better get that!’ I said trying to wriggle from his grip. ‘Oh, you think that’s going to help you?’ he teased and for a moment held me tighter. Laughing, I broke free and snatched my phone from the bedside. It was Kyoko. ‘The driver will meet you at sundown.’ As usual, she wasted no time on niceties, but this time I didn’t mind. ‘And you need to make sure that Tomas makes an intention.’ ‘Of course,’ I told her and we hung up. After eating breakfast in town, Tomas and I wandered down to the grassy knoll near the sea, the place I’d first met Kyoko. Underneath a Norfolk pine tree, we sang and slept and waited. Lying on my stomach, I stared into miniature forests of turf still yellow and crisp from summer. I watched their denizens — mostly ants — teeter and recalibrate beneath the weight of the things they carried. They shared pictures with one another and if I relaxed, I would have flashes of those pictures in my own mind’s eye. But I knew too, that astral pictures weren’t my business anymore, because there was another, deeper plane of knowing. Life pulsed through every part of me, I could feel it coursing through every vein and with that, I was able to conjure long moments filled with wide expanses of mental silence. The silence was so relaxing, that I would never again be afraid of what monsters could appear from within it. 88 In the evening, we bought a cheap and cheerful Indian meal in town. Tomas kept asking me questions about Shikoku, and I found creative ways to evade them. After some tea, we went to the beach to meet the driver. The sun had set and the colours had begun to drain from the land around us, leaving the saltbushes and dunes washed with greys. While we waited at the edge of the car park, Tomas sung me a sketch of a new song that he said had begun landing in skeins of colour in his head.

‘I peaked yesterday in the Centrelink queue It’s all down hill from here now you’re working for the dole We may not see each other again Except on weekends But I still smell you In the courtyard Smoking my last ciggie And I know It’s no biggie Because I’ve been asking For a long time For any fire To burn us all down To the ground To the ground Now you’re on Mutual Obligation We’re on different Different payments It’s all down hill From here…’ 89 His song ended with an ululation which wrenched at my heart, even though I was also laughing at the lyrics. ‘Dope!’ I exclaimed, aware of my understatement. I couldn’t see the silvery hazel colour of his eyes, but I sensed them as bright as the first star, its light emerging in the sky above us. I thought of all that was to come for him on his trip to Shikoku. ‘Your turn to sing something!’ he commanded. But I had already spotted the car coming towards us. ‘Another time, for sure. Right now we need to move.’ After packing our luggage away, we buckled ourselves into the car. The driver twisted around and handed Tomas a sealed envelope with his name on it. I watched his fingers, their nails bitten to the quick, tear it open. ‘Wait!’ I snatched it from his hands. He looked stunned and I didn’t blame him. ‘You need to make an intention.’ And Tomas did.

90 Mapping (non)representations of metamorphoses, tricksters and insects through seven stories

91 Exegesis introduction

This exegesis maps what I have called (non)representations, in particular metamorphoses involving tricksters and insects (and sometimes trickster–insects) in contemporary texts, including in my own works of fiction and ficto-criticism. As mentioned above, my writing is charged with a strategic epistemological reticence in places, and I embrace this, rather than adopting an overly argumenta- tive tone. My desire has been to keep the subject open, to examine its multiplicities, rather than attempt to know in conclusive, concrete or hierarchical terms. Chapter one in this exegesis is a review of the literatures which have informed my theoretical project. Therein, I have extended post-human and critical animal studies perspectives to (non)representations of animals/insects, metamorphoses/becomings and tricksters. The significant theorists whose ideas I canvas in the literature review and draw on throughout the dissertation are Rosi Braidotti, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Claire Colebrook, Kari Weil, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Carl Jung, Jean Knox, Barbara Babcock Abrahams, Lewis Hyde, CW Spinks and John Becker. In chapter two, I address methodology and the ways in which I have engaged “agnostic” research, rhizomatic research, phenomenological research, ficto-critical research and voice hearing, to carry out both my artistic practice and the exegetical research component of this project. Here I refer mainly to knowledge constructed by Jennifer Webb, Donna Lee Brien, Bryan Clarke, Jim Par- sons, Linda Finlay, Stephen Muecke, Heather Kerr and Hearing the Voice at Durham University. Chapter three, The Beetle’s Hum, deals with (non)representations of metamorphoses and insects as tricksters/figures of becoming/post-human in two novellas — Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild. Here, I also read the two novellas as exploring significant post- humanist forms, despite Kafka’s labelling of himself as “one of the long line of modernist, humanist minds.” (Blum 88) Chapter four, I Heard A Fly Buzz — When I Died explores George Langelaan’s “The Fly” and the two films which are based on it, directed by Neumann and Cronenberg respectively. Through my reading, I have found that the “The Fly” short story and films also portray powerful 92 post-humanist exemplars of trickster-insect figures and processes of (post-human) metamorphoses; most particularly the 1986 version, directed by David Cronenberg. Lastly, chapter five, Two Bloods, begins with a reading of my own novella, Order of Our Lady Cicada, which is about Magda, a character who knows she needs to change. Desperately exhausted from nightly attacks by an insectoid being, she is spirited away to an island to undergo a Japanese pilgrimage and initiation to a magical order, the culmination of which enables her to meet her trickster insect self. She journeys with a sense of beauty, tricky strangeness and at times, great discomfort, as she feels and faces other beings/her own mind and difficult feelings and memories. Like my readings of the other texts, the story is an attempted intervention in humanist metaphor, engaging the themes of tricksters, insects and metamorphoses as concretely and corporeally as I could manage in order to leave its interpretation as open as possible. The second section of chapter five, Two Bloods II, concluding the exegesis, is a work of fic- to-criticism written by Magda Levy, the central character from Order of Our Lady Cicada. She conducts a reading of a phantom text of my invention called I Am The Woo. This section is like a bonus track, a meta-logical epilogue to the thesis. The background is that Magda has returned from Japan, a trickster-insect-human-becoming, and begins postgraduate studies in English. She makes a trans-textual, nomadic roam into the liminal space between truth and fiction, reading I Am The Woo as a “sibling text” to Order of Our Lady Cicada. Finishing this paper with a new (tricky) beginning — Magda’s going forth into the world of creative research — feels a fit with the non-teleological nature of the thesis and my troubling of the borders between the transcendent and the immanent; the virtual and the actual.

93 Chapter one: Literature review

Introduction

In this chapter, I review the literature which has informed my explorations of (non)representations of tricksters and insectoid metamorphoses in the seven primary texts I have chosen to work with: Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Bloodchild by Olivia E. Butler, “The Fly” (short story) by George Langelaan, The Fly (the film released in 1958) directed by Kurt Neumann, The Fly (the film released in 1986) directed by David Cronenberg, Order of Our Lady Cicada, the novella I have written as part of this doctoral project, and Magda Levy will conduct a reading of a phantom text I have created called I Am The Woo. I am consciously adopting a (mostly) linear structure for this literature review, because although such a structure is rooted in the “fixity and lethal inertia of conceptual thinking” (Braidotti 2), it seems pragmatic to conform to this in my first major dissertation, and to know that I am capable of doing so, before attempting to subvert it entirely. I have divided this chapter under the following headings with the important caveat that the reader may find that there is some crossover between the two areas:

1) (non)representations of animal/insect becomings and metamorphoses 2) the trickster figure

In the first section on (non)representations of animal/insect becomings and metamorphoses, I cover the writing of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Claire Colebrook and Rosi Braidotti, particularly in terms of their provocations to the notion of representation and that which is beyond it, and as well, concerning the artistic exploration of animal/insect becomings and metamorphoses. In the second section of the literature review on tricksters, I unpack some of the complexities around notions of archetypes generally, and I address the trickster archetype or figure in particular, as it/they relate(s) to this project on (non)representations of insectoid metamorphoses in the

94 seven texts. The main theorists I draw upon and problematise here are Jean Knox, Carl Jung and Lewis Hyde. Most of the theorists whose work I have drawn upon have produced extensive research in the above arenas and beyond them. However, I have attempted here to include only the research that is most relevant to my work and in doing so have left great tracts of fascinating material waiting for future projects.

Animals/Insects: (Non)representations and Metamorphoses/Becomings

To begin this section of the literature review, I wish to ground the discussion in some basic definitions of metaphor and representation. These are definitions which speak to my overall project, and its task of problematising these concepts, especially when they are over-emphasised as ways of being and knowing in the context of liberal humanism. Firstly, in terms of a cultural definition of metaphor, Hawkes articulates that the word:

…comes from the Greek word metaphora derived from meta meaning ‘over’, and pherein, ‘to carry’. It refers to a particular set of linguistic processes, whereby aspects of one object are ‘carried over’ or transferred to another object, so that the second object is spoken of as it were the first. (1)

In Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild, the insectoid being T’Gatoi is described as “something swimming through the air as though it were water” (9). This image well illustrates the carrying over of one object (in this case an element) to another. O’Sullivan et al. outline that “metaphors work paradigmatically — they insert the unknown into a new paradigm from which it derives part of its new meaning” (137). In my novella, Order of Our Lady Cicada, Magda worries she will “stand out like a snake on a cake” (42) if she attempts to stowaway on a bus full of elderly Japanese pilgrims. Indeed, a snake is generally unknown in the realm of baked goods. Similarly Ricoeur opines, “as a figure, metaphor constitutes a displacement and an extension of the meaning of words; its explanation is grounded in a theory of substitution” (3). On representation, according to O’Sullivan et al. “the term refers…both to the process and to the product of making signs stand for their meanings…Representation is the process of putting into concrete forms, (that is, different signifiers) an abstract ideological concept” (199). It

95 is this logic of substitution and abstraction that is at the centre of my project in this dissertation. I am exploring forms of writing that seek to resist abstraction, that keep the trace of corporeality in their use of language. It is critical at this point to raise the important distinction between the concepts of metaphor and metonymy, especially as made in the influential argument by Roman Jakobson, whose analysis of language in a foundational essay in 1956, tied metaphorical modes of writing to poetry, and metonymy to prose (115-133). Metonymy is defined by O’Sullivan et al. as working “by using a part or element of something to stand for the whole” (181), for example, in the phrase, “let me give you a hand,” “a hand” is substituted for “some help.” An example of metonymy in Order of Our Lady Cicada is when the character, Kyoko, fears “that her home town of Ibaraki had been contaminated by nuclear waste, because of Fukushima” (pg). Here “Fukushima” refers to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. In her exploration of an alternative aesthetics, Denise Green makes an argument against the logic of substitution, which is similar to what follows in this exegesis, arguing that in a metonymic mode of artistic practice, “man (sic) is continuous with the context in which he finds himself, and man and nature are not opposed to each other. Rather they are part of the same continuum” (9). As such, metonymy’s more horizontal mode of representation is also closer to the project of my novella. Some other examples of language use I give in my textual analysis in this thesis could be called metonymic, but this is only one mode of (non)representation that I want to foreground in my exploration: there are other ways of keeping the trace of the body and the energy of matter in the written work. Indeed, this project problematises the process and product of thinking and thought as representation. Here Colebrook relates Delezue’s perspective on this logic:

The very concept of thought as representation assumes that there is some objective, present, real and external world that is then re-presented by thought, as though thought were a passive picture or copy of the world. There would be an actual world (the real), and then its virtual and secondary copy. Deleuze wants to reverse and undermine this hierarchy. Both the actual and the virtual are real, and the virtual is not subordinate to the real. (1)

I am both persuaded by Deleuze and find confirmation of his perspective in my own experience. I regularly corporeally experience another world of “taboo” (Gumbrecht 78) presences, of thought- 96 forms, a “virtual” world which vividly and immanently braids with the so-called actual. Indeed, the imbricated representational and the real are also part of Magda’s experience in Order of Our Lady Cicada. Colebrook’s reading of Deleuze advances that his approach also deals with the desire that lies beyond representation, positioning it as anti-Oedipal, “positive and immanent” (xvi). Moreover, for Deleuze, desire is not an avaricious or necessarily excessive force but a productive one. Nor is it an expression of lack (Parr 66) or something to be transcended or controlled (Colebrook xvi). In order to trace desire as Deleuze describes it, I make connections with tricksters which I trace through the seven texts. I consider that the ancient trickster trope comprises anti-Oedipal figures, often inspired by various forms of desire, driven by innate rebelliousness and their libidinal energies. In terms of the provocation to look at what is beyond desire and at what it does, with regard to Deleuze’s approach, Colebrook further elucidates:

Deleuze insisted that there was no ultimate ground or foundation; whatever values we have are created rather than given. He also reacted against the other extreme, whereby all our values are merely representations or constructions. His alternative was this: we can select and assess our values, not by giving them some ultimate meaning or foundation but by looking at what they do. (xxxii)

Deleuze here is not looking to a higher plane of ideals, rather to a world of what is. In selecting and assessing values there is a sense of responsibility: the ability to respond, rather than deference to fatalism and determinism. There is an aliveness and anarchic dynamism to dealing with what representation does, to how it plays out, its affect, which is very distinct from asking what it means. It lives in the realm of desire-as-agency, praxis and tactics, as distinct from dead ideology and belief. Of particular relevance to this project, is that treating representation in terms of what it does, locates it in body/mind, not in the disembodied, abstracted concept of mind. The nuance in my mapping of (non)representations of metamorphoses, tricksters and insects which flows from looking at what representation or art does — the transgression of meaning, or looking at that which is in excess of it — is validated here by Colebrook in her explication of Deleuze:

97 If we simply look for a work’s meaning, Deleuze insists, we merely replace one set of signs with another. By asking what it means we do not consider how art works; how meaning is produced and how what is in excess of meaning also transforms the sense of art. We need to consider how art works. (177)

And so I affirm that the locus of that which is in excess of or transgresses meaning lives in body/ mind. It is experience or attuning which is beyond conceptual reasoning or understanding. The (non)representable — pleasure, emotion and sensation — is as Colebrook suggests, transformative. And to respond to the question of what representation does, rather than what it means: it does becoming. Also relevant to my approach in this thesis to representation and meaning are the following questions by Hans-Georg Gadamer from Hermeneutik, Ästhetik, Pratische Philosophie, cited in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s text, Production of Presence. Gadamer, asks:

…can we really assume that the reading of (such) texts is a reading exclu- sively concentrated on meaning? Do you not sing these texts? Should the process by which a poem speaks be only carried by a meaning intention? Is there not, at the same time, a truth that lies in its performance? This, I think, is the task with which the poem confronts us. (63)

Although it is neither poetry nor the performance of it that I am concerned with in this thesis, I feel Gadamer’s questions are important to my process in exploring the ways in which there is something that exceeds meaning in the works of my concern: a sense of energy and desire. As such, I will treat the works themselves as corporeal becomings, and my resolve to do so is influenced by such articulations as by Sontag below, in her brilliant attack on interpretation:

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reac- tionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. (13) 98 I agree with Sontag that in western culture, the intellect is valorised and the importance of its output overemphasised, poisonously so. Gumbrecht also insightfully contributes: “rather than have to think, always and endlessly, what else there could be, we sometimes seem to connect with a layer in our existence that simply wants the things of the world close to our skin” (106). This too is relevant to the texts that I am exploring here, particularly in my own work, Order of Our Lady Cicada, where the central character Magda is on a pilgrimage to have a whole/holier/hybridised experience of the world. She desires the things of the world being close to her skin, or her animal nature, as she is tired and suspicious of the mental simulacra that assail her. She is arrested in the transcendent realm of her floridly chaotic disembodied mind, and the only way beyond it is to meet its representations head-on, to integrate them, thus becoming her animal/post-human self. As part of her post-humanist project, Braidotti’s ironic mocking of Borges’s tricky animal taxonomy (3) frames animal representations in Deleuzian terms: “animals come in three categories: those we humans eat, those we watch television with and those we are frightened of (wild, exotic or untamed ones)” (121). I have included this taxonomy, because this categorisation is another aspect of representation that this project problematises: the division of animals into wild, exotic or untamed. Moreover, Braidotti’s jesting feels like a droll segue into her theoretical approach and how it is of use to this project. Her New Materialist text Metamorphoses is of direct relevance to my research both as an intervention on representations of insects and becoming, and also for her ontology generally. She is suspicious (as are those whose work she draws on — Deleuze, Irigaray and Derri- da) of logos, reason, linearity and concepts in general, favouring instead processes, paradoxes, transformations and complexities. However, Braidotti admits that doing so is challenging, as “in spite of the sustained efforts of many radical critics, the mental habits of linearity and objectivity persist in their hegemonic hold over our thinking” (1). Further on this theme, and in the process of highlighting challenges I have faced in attempting to map tricksters, insects and metamorphoses non-representationally, Braidotti elaborates:

The fact that theoretical reason is concept-bound and fastened upon essential notions makes it difficult to find adequate representations for processes, fluid in-between flows of data, experience and information. They tend to become frozen in spatial, metaphorical modes of representation which itemise them as “problems.” (2) 99 Here Braidotti highlights yet another of my concerns regarding representation, and her point is part of the foundation of my entire thesis: that there is a dearth of adequate representations of processes, for it is the processes of metamorphoses that I am concerned with, not their end or beginning and not any one fixed facet of them. Likewise, I consider the characters in my creative work to be non- teleological processes or events, rather than entities. For my exploration of this process, I am using as a critical and creative stage the metamorphoses of animals (particularly insects) as tricksters, transformations which I will argue are in a state of flux not of fixity, notably in the texts I am con- centrating on. I am also inspired in this dissertation by Braidotti’s quarrel with conceptual reasoning and how it extends to language and consciousness; the latter, she charges, is “far from being an act of vertical transcendence, rather [it] functions as a push downwards, almost like an act of inner inva- sion…. As such, consciousness is rapacious, predatory, unthankful and self-obsessed” (122). Deleuze talks about this too, stating that “thought is primarily trespass and violence, the en- emy” (Deleuze 139). I take the points here made by both Braidotti and Deleuze as pointing to a concern with the Cartesian/humanist conception of mind,2 which is that it is a distinct entity from the body, and I share their concern. In terms of how this affects human/animal relations and the notion of un-doing the influence of the rationalist mind upon them, Deleuze too, according to Braidotti, problematises “the Oedi- palised representation of animal and how to deterritorialise or nomadise the human-animal interaction” (121). I agree with Braidotti that philosophical “nomadism” (which I will expand on below) is

2 The Cartesian mind/body split, as established by Rene Descartes in 1637 in Discourse on the Method and as it is problematised in this thesis, is well captured by his position here: “I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist.” (15) 100 in a way an antidote to frozen, Oedipialised,3 phallogocentric thought.4 Significantly, Braidotti asserts that the de-centring of mind is itself a kind of insectoid becoming: “insects are powerful indicators of the de-centering of anthropocentrism and point to post-human sensibilities and sexualities” (105). Braidotti’s insights are very important to this project; they provide theoretical support to my case for challenging dominant representations of animals which are central to western thought. Per- haps here it is appropriate to note the deterritorialising/decolonising of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous notion that animals are “good to think” (89) by Kari Weil, who premises her text, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? on the idea that it is better to “un-think animals”” (xvi). Fur- ther, Agamben argues that:

The relation between man and animal marks the boundary of an essential domain, in which historical inquiry must necessarily confront that fringe of ultrahistory which cannot be reached without making recourse to first philosophy. It is as if determining the border between human and animal were not just one question among many discussed by philosophers and theolo- gians, scientists and politicians, but rather a fundamental metaphysico-political operation in which alone something like “man” can be decided upon and produced. (21)

3 By “Oedipalised thought” I refer to what Lorraine describes as a “a contemporary form of social repression that reduces the forms desire takes - and thus the connections desire makes - to those that sustain the social formation of capitalism” (191). Further, Oedipalisation was first problematised and explored at length by Deleuze and Guattari in their text Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Like them, I also question the incestuous triangulation myth, which Freudians and other proponents of psychoanalysis fear humans would inevitably devolve to without the bonds of civilisation. Deleuze and Guattari hold:

It is doubtful that incest was a real obstacle to the establishment of society, as the partisans of an exchangist conception claim...The real danger is elsewhere. If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire...is capable of calling into question the established order of society...it is revolutionary in its essence...It is therefore of vital importance for a society to repress desire, and even to find something more efficient than repression, so that repression, hierarchy, exploitation, and servitude are themselves desired...that does not at all mean that desire is something other than sexuality, but that sexuality and love do not live in the bedroom of Oedipus, they dream instead of wide-open spaces, and...do not let themselves be stocked within an established order. (116)

4 Phallogocentrism is a conflation of phallocentrism and logocentrism (the centrality of the phallus and of language respectively) to name the centrality of phallic thinking, first coined by Jacques Derrida and which Terry Eagleton suggests with a colloquial adjective, “we might roughly translate as ‘cocksure’” (164). 101 The provocation of this grand “metaphysico-political operation” to determine the border between “man” and “animal” comes as the basis of calls for alternative representations, such as that which Braidotti’s text Metamorphoses achieves, and this is also part of my aim in this thesis. How- ever, a significant portion of my research is carried out through my artistic practice, whereas Braidotti conducts hers through a comparatively more traditional and analytical method of theorisa- tion. In expression of Metamorphoses’ call, Braidotti states, “one of the aims of this book…is to explore the need and to provide illustrations for new figurations, for alternative representations and social locations for the kind of hybrid mix we are in the process of becoming” (2). The hybrid mix we are “becoming” is also central to my thesis, as an alternative to metaphorical constructions of animal figures, and attempted jettisoning of the body from the process of transcendence. Like Braidotti, I will also refer to this as “radical immanence” (5), while also taking care not to romanticise the body in place of the mind, a move which only reinforces the problematic binary logic I am trying to de-stabilise. Further on “becoming,” regarding its relationship to qualities of temporality and linearity, Braidotti writes that it:

…works on a time sequence that is neither linear nor sequential…Processes of becoming, in other words, are not predicated on a stable, centralised Self who supervises their unfolding. They rest rather on a non-unitary, multi-layered dynamic subject. Becoming woman/animal/insect is an affect that flows like writing, it is a composition, a location that needs to be constructed together with, that is to say, in the encounter with others. (118)

This particular passage is of great significance to my creative work and the other creative texts that I draw upon in this dissertation (Metamorphosis, Bloodchild and “The Fly” — the short story and two film versions). It is indeed in the affective “flow” zone and in encounter with others, human and non-human, that both my own becomings and writings have occurred. Especially important for this thesis in the above passage by Braidotti is her critique of a centralised Self supervising an organic process of unfolding. I agree with Braidotti that such a Self is wholly counter to an understanding of the movement of becoming, and is borne of the phallogocentric systems of control which posit that the constructed western liberal humanist mind is somehow superior, and separate, to all else. Hence, my explorations of (non)representations of tricksters and

102 metamorphoses are in effect attempts at de-throning/de-sacralising this centralised supervising and authoritarian Self to which she refers. Of further relevance to this project is that, according to Braidotti, “writing is for Deleuze a sort of becoming animal. Loyal to his anti-phallogocentric vision of creativity, Deleuze praises the nomadic force of writing, which implicates one into the spatio-temporal co-ordinates of the field of yet unknown perception and experience” (126). It is also my experience that writing is nomadic and a process of becoming, which enables me to feel, flow into encounters and to un-think and loosen some of the representations and meanings which have knotted themselves tightly to my living experiences, through the dominance of humanist thought. This is not to say that representation and experience can ever be truly separated, but at least through the writing process there is a greater chance of deterritorialising and connecting with Deleuzian desire. In the case of the creative part of my project, where the main characters experience a pilgrimage, I have treated this nomadism and deter- ritorialism concretely. The theoretical exploration has also been nomadic, especially as I started out with very different ideas to those I am working with here. Indeed, the entire doctoral process has been a nomadic encounter. Further, drawing on Braidotti’s argument above, with regard to becoming as a “multi-layered dynamic subject” (118), I note her affirmation that, “becoming is a persistent challenge and an opposition to Molar, steady identities: it functions on an anti-Hegelian, anti-developmental, anti- teleological model” (119). This is vital to my work, as I do not set up a Hegelian dialectical argument nor one which seeks to provide any kind of answer to a problem; even if I were to try, it would not work as “there are no systematic linear or teleological stages or phases of becoming” (Braidotti 120). This resonates with my findings from the creative practice component of my work, as it was my aim in my writing to have my various characters make unexpected and non-linear leaps in their “becomings,” challenging the transcendent notion of a singular linear process. In terms of further problematising representations of animals, Braidotti bases her position on the notion that, “animals are…living metaphors, highly iconic emblems within our language and culture. We normally and fluently metaphorise them into referents for values and meanings” (125). Challenging this notion, Braidotti argues that metaphorisation of the de-valorised others expresses the ontological violence of the dominant subject (3). She counters this with a Deleuzian approach, which “does not interpret the animal metaphorically but is taken in its radical immanence as a field of forces, a quantity of speed and intensity” (126). Braidotti also refers to the problem of how, since antiquity, “animals have been associated with technology and machines not only because they allegedly lack an innate rational soul and con- 103 sequently a will and a sovereign subjectivity of their own, but also because they are industrial workers” (126). Here a kind of proletariat is posited by Braidotti, in one of the few instances where the topic of work appears in this text. She extends her point here, with deeper relevance to my project: “the taxonomy of animals reads at times like an industrial production plant: animals are used as prototypes for engineering, especially insects” (126). This is important, as some of the texts I am reading in this project impose taxonomy and hierarchy onto insects, and my thesis calls for the destabilising of such logics of hierarchical division and separation, for industrial, or any purposes. I return to Braidotti in a moment, first looking to Deleuze and Guattari’s concerns with representation, particularly the concept of metaphor. The two scholars quote Kafka’s blunt assertion in his 1921 diaries: “metaphors are one of the things that makes me despair of literature” (22), mapping its bounds further: “Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all signification, no less than all designation. Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor” (22). Braidotti elaborates, extending the notions to the realm of animals: “for Deleuze, animals are neither functional to teleological systems of classification, nor are they about metaphors: they are rather about metamorphoses” (126). Despair at metaphors strikes me deeply and resonantly when I consider the travesty of humanistic, anthropocentric positioning of non-human animals as mere metaphors or objects to be exploited, or as some kind of transport to an upwards, transcendent telos. Braidotti’s conjunctive point, that Kafka’s writing is “anti-Oedipal, in so far as it resists the colonising force of the Molar system and the totalising influence of narrative closure” (127), is also relevant to this project. It inspires me to attempt to think and write animals (both human and non-) in ways which depart from the self-similarising tendency of linear, Molar systems, and to favour instead more open processes and flows. It encourages me to feel that my novella and exegesis need not end with all loose ends tied tidily up. Although my previous fictional and academic works have also not aimed for closure, I hope the result of this particular project has seen an overall evolution or metamorphosis of my research processes, taking open processes and flows even further than previous attempts, and thus challenging the hegemony of humanism in writing praxis more profoundly, in both its content and form. Further on metamorphoses, or becomings, and of particular significance to this project, is Braidotti’s positioning of them as “minoritarian,” as they “inevitably and necessarily move into the direction of the ‘others’ of classical dualism — displacing and reterritorialising them in the process” (119). Deleuze and Guattari also explore this concept in numerous texts, articulating in Kafka: To- ward a Minor Literature that, “a minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language” (16). 104 Apart from the obvious reason — that it is about Kafka — Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature is useful to my research on a number of levels. Firstly, my novella about trickster/becoming insect and the de-centring of the Western mind in many ways takes its inspiration from Kafka’s own novella, Metamorphosis, and the way that it, in its concreteness, resists transcendence and metaphor, just as Deleuze and Guattari highlight. Secondly, three of the nomadic becoming-animal characters in my novella, Magda, Bron and Tomas, live in a dark, dirty, cramped share house, eating cheap, processed or free food, and have ambiguous relationships with substances, art, ethnicity and one another. My subtle suggestion through their names that the three of them are either first or second generation refugees from East- ern Europe and/or the Middle East has been a site for my own rhizomatic, phenomenological research into becoming-minor. Another character who has an experience of becoming minor is Michiko. She presents post-graduate research in an unnamed Western Australian university, in a language which is not her own, but also in the language of silence which is her own, to find herself admonished for the alterity of her work. For the writing of my novella, and of these characters in particular, I draw on my own becoming-minor experience as a second generation Egyptian Jewish refugee, and a third generation Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor — an Ashkenazi, Arab/Sephardi Jewish Australian. I attempt to explore this through Magda’s alterity in Japan, in her encounters with others there (some of whom are also outsider/insiders in their “own” culture), but also through her encounters with her own memory and, in some ways, the violence of her own (disembodied) mind in its vain attempts to direct her life from a central supervising Self (Braidotti 118). Her becoming-animal experience can be read as metaphoric, but as the story’s writer, I am interested in exploring through my creative process this experience more non-representatively and concretely, which is why I resist reading it metaphorically in the section devoted to it, and focus on its more concrete elements. Furthermore, in regards to my own minoritarian/Otherness — bearing in mind Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of minor literature, and its possible relation to my writing — although English is my first language, it was taught to me by my dispossessed refugee relatives. So while I am in no way suggesting that my writing has the power or skill demonstrated by Kafka, I am asking if, like Kafka, I am “a sort of stranger within his (my) own language” (26). Given the conditions of my own learning of English through rebellious blends and naive remixes of English, Yiddish, French and Arabic, shame and laughter-inducing mispronunciations and humorously tricky wordplay, I would answer in the affirmative.

105 Braidotti adds further provocation to the discussion on becoming-minor by pointing out that, “just being a minority, however, is not enough: it is only the starting point. Crucial to becoming- Nomad is undoing the oppositional dualism of majority/minority and arousing an affirmative passion for and desire for the transformative flows that destabilise all identities” (84). This idea of “destabilising of all identities” was a major theme in my honours thesis, where I wrote on my (paradoxical) Arab-Jewish identity, as well as the influence of the trickster and slacker upon my work, as part of an attempt at destabilising fixed homogenous identity through hybridity and trickery (Braunstein). Through my research, I have found that many tricksters in ancient and contemporary stories work to destabilise dualism, and I have tried to invoke this throughout this dissertation as a recurrent disruptor in my exploration of textual (non)representations of insects and metamorphoses. On binaries and Otherness, Timothy Morton provokes a rethinking of (environmental) racism and antiracism in the context of the non-human turn, arguing through his reading of the video clip for the 1980 Talking Heads song “Crosseyed and Painless,” that “the lineage that brought us slavery and racism is also the lineage that brought us the anthropocentric boundary between human and non-human” (167). Through emerging object-oriented ontology, he advances the case for changing the meaning of object and asks, “is it possible to think antiracism without anthropocentrism?” (167). I raise this provocation too in the following chapter when interrogating (non)representations of flies, tricksters and refugees as border-subjects. On becoming-minor and multi-species entanglements, Octavia E. Butler’s work is a particularly compelling site for my exploration. In her novella Bloodchild, she depicts a family in cramped conditions on a distant planet who have entered into a deal with a highly intelligent indigenous species of insectoid creatures to be hosts for their implanted eggs: “When the eggs hatch, the humans are cut open. Not everyone survives” (Kenan 498). Butler, an African-American author whose writing is playful and inventive, could be described by Deleuze and Guattari as employing the second condition for minoritarian writing, which is, “that everything (in them) is political” (17), despite Butler’s open denial that the story is about slavery. Instead, she declares that the story of human men being impregnated by insectoid alien spawn is about other things. She states in an interview in 1991, about the humans in Bloodchild:

They have made a deal. Yes, they can stay there but they are going to have to pay for it. And I don't see the slavery, and I don't see this as particularly barbaric. I mean if human beings were able to make that good a deal with another species, I think it would be miraculous. (498) 106 I too read Bloodchild as a tale about symbiosis; in the sense that it is also an exemplar of minor literature, very much in line with Braidotti’s condition of minority/nomadic literature, “arousing an affirmative passion for and desire for the transformative flows that destabilise all identities” (84). Because of this arousal, and because, in my view, its narrative also flows into notions of tricksters and metamorphoses, Butler’s novella gives much impetus to the central themes of this thesis. I explore the text more extensively in the next chapter. Hugh Raffles’s reference in his text Insectopedia to a work from a Japanese, post late-Heian period collection of short stories. “The Lady Who Loved Worms” is a story about a Lady’s fascination with larvae and the ways in which she, as an outsider, is in defiance of social convention. She is “drawn to things that lacked pretence…she admired the fundamental phenomena—that is, the ever- changing reality behind the “reality” in which we foolishly live” (Raffles 169). I first read The Lady’s position as proto-post-modern in its focus on the little things as some kind of rejection of master narratives, and also as an embrace of “becoming-minor” (Deleuze and Guattari 18). Howev- er, her interest in “essence,” as seen in the story’s translation here — “what is truly amusing is tracing something to its origins and understanding its essence” (Hemman) — indicates a transcendent essentialism which could perhaps be considered anathema to the post-structuralist/post-humanist idea that phenomena is in a perpetually baseless and fluid state. Given that my position is not completely anti-essentialist, I theorise this with more of a Heideggerean process and consider one of Heidegger’s points in The Origin of the Work of Art as pertinent: “what is in truth the thing, insofar as it is a thing? When we so ask, we want to learn to know the being-thing (the thingness) of the thing. The point is to experience (erfahren) the thingness of the thing” (5). Just as insect trickster character Magda, in my novella, attempts to experience “thingness” from the point of view of her metamorphosed hybrid self, as distinct from her falsely unified human(ist) self, I trace the exploration of “thingness” in the insect trickster works by Kafka, Butler, Langelaan, Neumann and Cro- nenberg, and as well in Order of Our Lady Cicada and I Am The Woo. This is part of my explorations of that which is beyond (non)representation. The Lady’s (in “The Lady Who Loved Worms,”) fascination with the nascent stage of the metamorphosis is also important for this project. Hemman translates: “she would take out some caterpillars that were entering metamorphosis and show them to her parents.” In my novel, it is not until the final pages that the significant becoming occurs for the characters. Everything else could be said to occur in a chrysalis.

107 Kari Weil and her work on animal representations from a post-humanist critical animal studies perspective is also an important resource for my interrogation on insects and metamorphoses. Her text Thinking Animals — Why Animal Studies Now presents a powerful intervention in the primacy of humanism and makes an excellent case for how we humans are always already entangled with animals. However, I do not necessarily allow my study to become stuck in representational concepts of “human” and “animal,” and nor does Weil, who problematises these very categories in her own work. Indeed, the first point Weil makes in her text that is particularly significant for my project is that, ‘not unlike the term woman or slave, animal is a term that men have given others so as to name themselves the agents of history, freedom, thought.’ (27) This is a very important consideration to the entirety of this project and I base much of my thinking and process upon it. Weil’s disruption of “they/them” narratives liberates some of the insectoid animality which dwells in the shadows of the pursuit of the grander, industrial humanist narrative.

Weil also makes the following provocation that is instrumental to my research:

For centuries nonhuman animals have been locked in representations au- thored by humans, representations that, moreover, have justified their use and abuse by humans. But unlike in women’s studies or ethnic studies, those who constitute the objects of animal studies cannot speak for themselves, or at least they cannot speak the languages that the academy recognises as necessary for such self-representation. Must they then be forever condemned to the status of objects? (2)

Weil’s final question is important: must insects/animals always be objectified? Or is there potential to trouble this reification through some of the decolonising processes of post-humanist thought and praxes, particularly critical animal studies, New Materialism and object oriented ontology?5 Can creative writing itself also be an instrumental minority praxis as far as decolonising the liberal humanist authoring of animal representations? This latter question is at the heart of my project.

5 I refer at several points in this paper to object oriented ontology (ooo) as a strand of post-humanism which provokes anthropocentrism but differs from New Materialism. A paper by Leach which explores the differences between the two, regards ooo as neo-Heideggerian and New Materialism as comparatively based in post-structuralist anti-essentialism. I find both movements valuable as I reference both Heidegger and proponents of New Materialism, and will continue to explore these ideas in future projects; however it would be too much of a digression from the topic/s of this paper to expand in depth on their differences. 108 While overall, I find Weil’s intervention above useful, I also note problematic omissions in her discussion in that she fails to mention disabilities, children’s or ageing studies within the humanities in A Report On The Animal Turn. These areas and intersections also attempt to speak to agents who cannot always speak in the ways “the majority” culture understands. Notwithstanding her omission, Weil’s idea is still important to my thinking, particularly her inquiry into the area of language. Here she makes the very salient point that:

Thought, consciousness, and language are not the exclusive property of humans. Indeed, there is no shared consensus on what these properties consist in. From the perspective of theory, animal studies may have emerged only in time for its existence to be outdated. Much like the “women” in women’s studies, the “animal” in animal studies must be placed under erasure. (19)

This notion triggers a strange self-consciousness in me, which I also experience when telling people, particularly other academic researchers and activists, that my doctorate is in animal studies. I am often quick to explain that my questions are based in a post-human, anti-capitalist, anti-patri- archy perspective, not in the pursuit of a single, rights (liberal) based issue, and ideally still with an embrace of the complex intersectionality around the issue 6 — animal/insect/woman/Other — yet without adopting an identity politics frame. As informed by the likes of Braidotti, Deleuze, Guattari and Weil, I am attempting to problematise and provoke the liberal humanist paradigm, for all human and non-human assemblages, and to be critical of the master narratives and ideology that inform many animal rights advocates. Thus, I have sought literatures that approach animal studies in the struggle for a future, post-human humanities, not those from animal rights narratives which do not challenge the present systems of control and authority, systematically or ideologically.

6 Intersectionality was first named by Kimberle Crenshaw in her foundational article, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” in which she addresses how race and gender intersect in shaping violence against women of colour, through structural, political, and representational aspects (1244). Crenshaw highlights that her intent is not for intersectionality to become a totalising thesis but that she aims to address multiplicity when looking at how we construct society. Similarly, I am not suggesting that my ideas are totalising frameworks of meaning, rather I am calling into consideration multiple grounds for consideration around the animal as a further site for addressing distributions of power and hierarchy, especially related to violence, but also when it comes to liberation and “becoming.” I am also asking that we look at structural, political, and representational aspects within the class of animals and the intersections therein, not only the differences between “charismatic megafauna” and animals lower down the phy- logenetic tree to them, which I refer to below, but also if we think of African wasps differently to how we think of European ones, or about Australian mosquitos differently to South American mosquitos. I address this to an extent around the issue of the Zika virus, and it certainly beggars further exploration in future research. 109 In particular, I find Donovan’s feminist animal care theory helpful as it problematises Kant- ian rights theory, because of its underpinning idea that rational equals make up society and also because this neglects to acknowledge power differentials between species. (306) She is also concerned that empathy and compassion are dispensed with, “as relevant ethical and epistemological sources for human treatment of nonhuman animals.” (306) Weil’s view here further compounds my call to divert from rights-based narratives:

Following feminists who have been critical of the way that the very notion of “women’s rights” may reify a fictional identity of women as subordinate and thereby entrench women within their subordination, one might ask how the notion of “animal rights” might similarly entrench animals within a falsely unifying idea of “the animal.” (2-3)

My project is aligned with Weil’s notion above that a fixed, static notion of “the animal” is just as problematic as some kind of essentialised conceptualisation of women, or any other marginalised group that is reduced to an essence by external authorship. This critique will lead into an intervention into notions of cuteness or totemic intelligence from a western industrialised gaze as de- sirable animal traits, and I challenge the fetishising of certain “charismatic megafauna” animal species and the downgrading of the welfare of less glamorous animals, such as insects, to a lower priority, or less central locus in some kind of imagined mapping of value. Indeed, Weil also claims “the notion of animal rights privileges a particular group of animals—those who can demonstrate a capacity for so-called rational agency—and leaves others unprotected” (3). Preceding Weil’s thesis, The Great Ape Project by Paola Cavallieri and Peter Singer in 1993 called for the immediate extension of human rights to apes. Apart from the fact that this project indeed privileges certain animals over others, it has also been criticised by Nora Groce and Jonathan Marks for its “linking of apes to children, the elderly and humans with disability” (819), and drawing upon the logic of eugenics, in their paper called “The Great Ape Project and Disability Rights: Ominous Undercurrents of Eugen- ics in Action.” Therefore, while it is a scientifically, politically and philosophically important provocation, Cavallieri and Singer’s work is also problematic on two levels, and it would be too far in excess of this project’s aims to analyse it adequately. Instead, my focus on insects is itself a reframing tactic, aimed at subverting the privileging of certain species.

110 More pertinently, Weil also posits in her text Thinking Animals, “…the issue becomes how to see and represent their being outside our terms of reference and without claiming an essentialised otherness” (27). Indeed, this has been a tremendous challenge, and not necessarily something I have taken on wholesale, given my interest in Heidegger’s “thingness.” Yet I have attempted to play with Weil’s ideas, especially through my creative praxis, and the sense of human-insect hybridity which occurs as part of Magda’s metamorphosis. Raffles also works with these concepts, rejecting otherness quite delightfully throughout his multi-species ethnography, although he leans towards fetishising insects in places. Perhaps my own interests in insects as tricksters and transformers are also a little fetishistic, but I ask firstly if that is so problematic, when in western humanist culture, insects are so maligned, feared, marginalised and even de-animalised and made alien; so perhaps, as a tactic, some amount of fetishisation on balance is acceptable and even strategic. Talk of fetish seems an appropriate moment to proceed into the theoretical terrain of tricksters.

The trickster figure

According to Lewis Hyde, the English word “trickster” as an anthropological term was first at- tributed to Franz Boas in 1898, in an introduction to James Teit’s Traditions of the Thompson River Indians (7-10). The term has since been used repeatedly to categorise a particular archetype, symbol and trope, originally within stories which have been told around the world since time immemorial. It is hard to make a singular definitive statement about what tricksters are, as the notion is slippery despite many attempts to universalise it. As such, I have included literature only helpful to my study on insects as tricksters and transformers. To launch this discussion, Kerenyi makes a broad statement which captures some of what is relevant about the trickster in this project:

Disorder belongs to the totality of life, and the spirit of this disorder is the trickster. His function…is to add disorder to order and so make a whole, to render possible, within the fixed bounds of what is permitted, an experience of what is not permitted. (185)

The acts of tricksters result in more dynamically robust establishments; ones which have transformed to withstand chaos.

111 The texts that I am looking at by Kafka, Butler, Langelaan, Neumann, Cronenberg, as well as my own work, contain what I am calling insectoid tricksters as their protagonists, characters who play with the spirit of disorder in their attempts to transform. The stories all weave threads of trickery, order and disorder, through their plots. Yet, it is important to remember that the figure of trickster is incredibly complex and pluralistic, and I do not wish to reduce it to something singular or univocal. To give further context to how I am treating archetypes in this project, leaving Kerenyi’s and Hyde’s research aside for now, I wish to highlight the work of Jean Knox, psychiatrist and Jun- gian analyst at the cutting edge of contemporary thought on archetypes. Knox brings together Jung’s structuralist, universalist ideas with more recent neuroscience, to hypothesise that archetypes emerge out of a combination of environmental influences and biology. She canvasses developmental research, putting forward:

Archetypes are not in themselves innate, genetic structures. The evidence from developmental research suggests that they can be equated with image schemas, the spatial models that are formed very early in the process of mental development and encode core information about the spatial relationships of objects in the world around us. These Gestalts then act as a base for extensive elaboration of these patterns in the symbolic world (65).

I privilege Knox’s view that archetypes are not solely inherited or innate genetic structures. Rather, they are impressions which emerge through the interaction of nature and culture and develop dynamically from there. François Martin-Vallas, who is also a proponent of the emergent view of archetypes, con- firms that archetypes are “a by-product of the encounter between culture and instinct” (283). I agree with this notion because I am wary of any kind of reductionism, particularly the humanist kind which tends to binarise nature and culture. The emergence theory holds a level of complexity which resonates with me and also presents archetypes within an epistemology which is more grounded and concrete than that which Jung was working with in his time. Knox expands further still on the emergent view:

Mind and meaning are constructed on the foundation stones of brain, instinct and perception. Meaning emerges out of the way in which the brain organises the mass of information presented to it every second, even though 112 the starting point for this process is a few instinctual patterns of behaviour which, unlike symbolic mental content, are fixed sub-cortical routines, which can be hard-wired and inherited genetically. (205)

Knox’s insistence on corporeality makes clear her concern that Jung’s method of approaching archetypes was indeed too ambiguous, as it “drew on philosophy, religion, mythology, physics, biology, psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis” (25). Although I find Jung’s ambiguity and diverse sources somewhat vexing, I am more concerned about his universalist presumptions about how everyone who lives and has ever lived experiences life; hence I would privilege the contemporary view, exemplified by Knox, which seems more capable of withstanding lines of flight (Deleuze and Guattari 9). For the purposes of my project, this is a far more appropriate context from which to approach tricksters, rather than the more structuralist, and therefore reductionist view-point that archetypes are universal and biologically or metaphysically fixed, as put forward by the earlier Eurocen- tric theorists — Kerényi, Jung and Radin. Despite their reductionist tendencies, these aforementioned thinkers have offered interesting thoughts in regard to tricksters which I include in the thesis, but I do not frame them in a universalist sense, rather instead in an emergent context. In terms of the qualities of tricksters which inform this project, Jung argues that “it” is “both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being”(263). Here, the “bestial and divine” reference is entirely relevant to my thesis about post-humanism and critical animal studies, and particularly to my work of fiction, which plays with the human becoming-animal characters as being part divine, possessing the nervous systems of primates and the potential intelligences of “higher” beings. By “higher” and divine, I refer not to a transcendent context, but to an immanent one, and read all of the post-human trickster characters I refer to in this thesis in this light, as expressing an insectoid/divine alchemy, or an embodied metamorphoses which occurs in a concrete, grounded way, not emblematically, but actually. In some cases this metamorphosis is from human to post-human, and in others it is seen more in an alien insectoid body/mind intelligence; for example, as in the case of the T'Gatoi in Butler’s Bloodchild, who after conducting an emergency caesarean-style operation on a male member of the humanoid species, Terrans:

came to the table, raised the front half of her body above it, and surged onto it. Sometimes she moved so smoothly she seemed to flow like water itself. She coiled herself into a small hill in the middle of the table and looked at me. 113 “That was bad,” she said softly. “You should not have seen it. It need not be that way.” (23)

T’Gatoi’s metamorphosis here is very concrete and corporeal, even if it is symbolised as water-like; from insectoid to alien to makeshift obstetrician to small coiled hill. This metamorphic moment in the text can be read as a shift from human to post-human, particularly with regard to male body as a reproductive site. Radin, whilst a canonical scholar on “the trickster” whose universalist approach draws my criticism, makes a point which is relevant to this thesis about the figure:

Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and nega- tor, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself…He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being. (xxiii)

Indeed, to consider ant colonies made up of tens of thousands of networked nests, or bees and their exquisite hive construction, and too the importance of the latter overall to ecosystems worldwide (including for food production) is to behold a startling sense of insectoid creativity. On the contrary, there is the more headline-grabbing representation of insects as maleficent destroyers — dirty, vicious spreaders of disease and stings — which writes in erasure of broader social/economic factors which foment viral and/or bacterial proliferation. Here, insect as creator and destroyer reveals a complex hybrid (trickster) representation. Later, I will refer to the cultural mediations on the Zika virus on a different point, but they are related here to this discussion of archetypal representations of insects as trickster-destroyers, and of the values that Radin argues they bring “into being.” In effect, their stings and their so-called spreading of disease draws attention to pre-existing inequity and injustice, wordlessly agitating for transformation. This speaks also to the Deleuzian idea as outlined by Colebrook, which I referred to above: “we can select and assess our values, not by giving them some ultimate meaning or foundation but by looking at what they do” (xxxii). As such, I am interested in this project less in the meanings circulating around insect tricksters, and more at what insect tricksters do, and the subversive values that come into being as a result of their creative intervention. My focus is more on tricksters as written figures of (Deleuzian) desire and transformation. A more contemporary scholar of trickster, Lewis Hyde (whose research I referred to above), 114 in his text Trickster Makes This World, imposes fewer ideas of universality upon his imagined tricksters than Kerenyi, Jung and Radin, making his ideas better aligned with the more post-structuralist/ post-humanist context that this thesis resides within. Hyde speaks to the paradoxes that can accompany tricksters as a boundary crosser: “Trick- ster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox” (7). This is of particular relevance to the discussion of insects for many reasons, but in particular because their flight patterns challenge liberal humanist notions of boundary, of na- tion and state. Paradoxically, but also importantly, Hyde notes, “there are also cases in which trickster cre- ates a boundary, or brings to the surface a distinction previously hidden from sight” (7).The phenomenon of the sexually and mosquito transmitted Zika virus has been a catalyst for discussion on reproductive freedom in certain parts of South America. This can be read as a powerful exemplar of where a (trickster) insect has provoked, and perhaps revealed, an ideological discourse which was previously less visible. Similarly, in Butler’s Bloodchild, perhaps due to her recognition of the necessity for the symbiosis or interdependence between the two species (the insectoid creatures need to impregnate human males in order for both to survive), one of the trickster insectoid aliens (protagonist) T’Ga- toi, protects the humans from untrammelled impregnation by other aliens. This happens despite, in the words of the human protagonist, Gan, that:

her people wanted more of us made available…I had lived outside with her. I had seen the desperate eagerness in the way some people looked at me. It was a little frightening to know that only she stood between us and that desperation that could so easily swallow us. (2)

Indeed in this instance, the trickster insect/alien, as a border creature, has also created a boundary, standing between her people and the Terrans male, preventing a kind of trans-species rape. I expand on this in the chapter that follows this literature review. Hyde’s discussion of tricksters is compelling for this work, particularly in terms of epistemology, as he does not begin or end his treatise with any clean, orderly or encapsulated statements about what tricksters are. Rather, at the outset we are invited as readers into his story and his adventures with the complex trope, and he finishes ambiguously. This lends his text, in my view, a degree of heretofore unseen integrity as it actually embodies trickery, rather than referring to the trickster 115 figure colonially, as an “other over there” to be studied at arm’s length by a so-called transcenden- tally neutral anthropologist. Nor does Hyde claim to know tricksters in a universalising sense, as many modernist scholars like Jung, Radin and Kerenyi do. On the paradoxical nature of the trickster figure, according to Barbara Babcock-Abraham, “as a ‘criminal’ culture hero…(trickster) embodies all possibilities — the most positive and the most negative — and is paradox personified” (148). Jung expands on paradox with his identification of trickster(s) as a “primitive, cosmic being of divine-animal nature, on the one hand superior to man because of his superhuman qualities, and on the other hand inferior to him because of his unreason and unconsciousness” (170). Jung also posited that, in contemporary society, the “so- called civilised” (173) person has forgotten the trickster and simply relates to “him” only metaphorically (173). I find this point quite compelling notionally, and also because it anticipates Deleuze and Guattari’s, and Braidotti’s, call for actuality, for metamorphosis over metaphor, as part of their problematising of the western liberal fascination with the transcendent over the immanent. Another way into tricksters is through the semiotic approach of Bill Spinks. Spinks argues that the trickster, “in his rawest form, is pure ambivalence; he is always the border creature who plays at the margins of self, symbol and culture and who echoes the epigenetic ambivalences of any line of demarcation” (177). Without wishing to open too much the very broad area of semiotics, Spinks’s playful treatise suggests that tricksters are proto-post-human/post-modern figures in their non-dualism. This informs aspects of my exploration of Langelaan’s “The Fly”; insectoid tricksters are not this or that; rather this and that. However, perhaps in their antique and preconscious expression they lack the self-consciousness and self-referentiality of actual post-modernist expression. Again, the reference to tricksters as (semiotic) border creatures, a point that I raised earlier, and which Spinks raises here, is significant to this study, particularly in its mapping of (non)representations of trickster insects in an assortment of texts, exploring the potential for the non-dual embodied mind, an approach grounded in a post-humanist theoretical approach. Of further relevance, particularly when conducting the close reading of tricksters in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, is the following observation by John Becker in his exploration of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” where he charges Kafka himself with being a trickster:

In so far as we can think of Kafka as a writer of oblique tales that defy expectation, “common sense,” and easily digestible glosses, he resembles the figure of the trickster. Found in the mythology of many different cultures,

116 the half-divine trickster is a liminal figure poised on the threshold between life and death, the profane and the sacred, mortal and divine. (101)

While it is outside of the bounds of this project to proffer further discussion on ways in which Kaf- ka himself may have embodied traits of a trickster, and which of his broader body of work beyond Metamorphosis bears such traces, I will refer to one critical node from which springs much of this thesis. In Metamorphosis, I see a possible reading of the protagonist Gregor as challenging the hierarchical precedents of the patriarchal family system, and the capitalist demands of human labour and general bourgeois social expectations, by becoming an insect, in an ultimate act of trickery. I expand more on this reading in the following chapter. As an addendum to this section of trickster, I turn my inquiry to Deleuze and Guattari once again, this time to their writing on rhizome. In botany, rhizome is a term for the root stock of a plant such as ginger, or turmeric, or a grass such as bamboo or couch, which is subterranean and grows horizontally without centre, in close exchange to its surrounding soil. Its cohesion is dynamic, chaotic, labyrinthine and without beginning or end. In philosophy, as Deleuze and Guattari first conceptualised it, the rhizome, not as metaphor but immanently, is also an exemplar of becoming, concerned with post-dialectical, non-teleological, non-hierarchical open-endedness, inclusive of genuine multiplicity (8). There is a particular site in this thesis where rhizome and trickster intersect, and this is in the (non)representation of the relationship between the humans in Butler’s novella, Bloodchild and the insectoid species, Tlics. Informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of the orchid and the wasp as a rhizome, and also by the trickster theory I have referred to above, in my reading of the novella I am exploring how the relationship between Terrans and Tlics reveals elements of a certain rhizomatic trickery. Finally on tricksters, in this dissertation I theorise about the vibrant and tricky human/non- human sacrament assemblages in Bloodchild by Butler (“the egg” [3]), and in my own Order of Our Lady Cicada (“plant spirit” [76 - 78] and I Am The Woo (“Saturnalius gnostica”). With regard to these assemblages, I engage Jane Bennett’s work, in which she advocates the vibrant materiality intrinsic to things in themselves. She says that she does this because:

…the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalised matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, 117 feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies. (ix)

Bennett’s ideas help me to theorise how the egg in Bloodchild is a kind of tricky Soma; how the imbibing of a plant sacrament in Order of Our Lady Cicada is a vibrantly tricky metamorphic moment; and how there is a “tough-love trickster intelligence” (Braunstein 42) about the organism/ alien sacrament from Saturn (Saturnalias gnostica) in I Am The Woo.

In this chapter I addressed literature that has been vital to informing my exploration in this thesis, organised beneath the following headings:

1) (non)representations of animals/insect becomings and metamorphosis 2) the trickster figure

While not exhaustive of all of the literatures on the above topics, the review covers those which have informed the specific discussion to follow; that is, my exploration of (non)representations of insectoid tricksters and metamorphoses in seven texts. These texts are Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Bloodchild by Olivia E. Butler, “The Fly” (short story) by George Langelaan, The Fly (movie made in 1958) directed by Kurt Neumann, The Fly (movie made in 1986) directed by David Cronenberg, Order of Our Lady Cicada, a novella I have written as the practice based component of this doctoral project, and a ficto-critical text where the protagonist from the former, Magda, reads I Am The Woo, a phantom story by me. In the next chapter I address the various methods which have assisted in the process of conducting this inquiry.

118 Chapter two: Methodology

For this thesis, which maps (non)representations of metamorphoses, tricksters and insects through seven stories, it has been important that I employ methods which support the nature of the work. Firstly, central to my methodology is that it is practice-based, and the fact that the novella, Order of Our Lady Cicada is an artefact embodying new knowledge, has meant that I have chosen methods which have lent themselves well to both my creative and exegetical practice. Secondly, the central discussion of this thesis, the problematisation of easily settled meaning-making through the sacralising of metaphor and transcendent ideology, has required that I engage methods which enable my attempt at a more corporeal exploration of the texts in question. Therefore, I have engaged “agnostic” research, rhizomatic research, phenomenological research, ficto-critical research and voice hearing, to carry out both my artistic practice and the exegetical research component of this project. Here I refer mainly to knowledge constructed by Jennifer Webb, Donna Lee Brien, Bryan Clarke, Jim Parsons, Linda Finlay, Heather Kerr and the Hearing the Voice study.

“Agnostic” research In terms of agnostic thinking, the paper, “‘Agnostic’ thinking: creative writing as practice- led research” by Jennifer Webb and Donna Lee Brien, has been a foundational text in my process. I consider an agnostic approach to be a vital epistemological element of any research process, one that is vastly different from the more theological model of traditional research, in the sense that as a researcher, I do not like to begin with knowing the answer to my question. In fact, I generally do not think I like to finish knowing the answer to my question; open or (non)endedness, which I also referred to above, is a hallmark of a minoritarian literature. I would hope simply to uncover further, deeper questions. In opting for a creative writing doctorate instead of a more traditional higher degree, before even starting the thesis, I had already committed to a certain level of agnosticism. In- deed, “creative practitioners/researchers, do not necessarily owe duty to conventional logic. They look rather to the creative tradition and its contemporary approaches, which often sidestep (or, at least, look awry at) logic, reason and empiricism” (Webb and Lee Brien 5). This project can be seen as such a sidestep. As Webb and Lee Brien also postulate:

119 …what we find within agnostic research, then, is a tolerance for complexity and confusion, and both a willingness and a capacity to be led by the data rather than by a predetermined point of view. (2)

While my exploration does not engage with “data” in the usual sense, I have still taken from the above that complexity and confusion is legitimate within agnostic research. Through this, I feel justified in not being swayed by a belief that research process and product ought to be ordered by a comparatively more theological method or structure. Whilst Webb and Lee Brien do not refer explicitly to hierarchy, I make the adjunctive point to their thesis, that an agnostic process presents an alternative to the more hierarchical forms of meaning-making found in more positivist research methods.

Rhizomatic research The next methodological node in my process is rhizomatic research. Here I am guided by the following axioms as outlined by Clarke and Parsons in their article on becoming a rhizome researcher (39) and below each axiom I comment on how I have applied it.

1. Rhizome researchers start where they are (nomadic) I started the project where I was — first with interest in carrying on from where my honours work in auto/ethnography left off, looking at identity and the trickster. My interest then drifted into the phenomenon of groups of people working together to support each other through therapeutic encounters with psychedelics (a phenomenon I refer to as “trickster community”). Finally, I settled/ unsettled on the present exploration of tricksters and insectoid metamorphoses,7 which was primarily arrived at through the voice of Magda, the protagonist in Order of Our Lady Cicada. The initial “trickster community” idea still features in the novella, without being explicitly labeled as such, when Magda participates in her final initiation with the Order of Our Lady Cicada. Magda refers directly to the phenomenon in the ficto-critical section of the dissertation, when she reads I Am The Woo, making it another node on the rhizome of the project. The trickster has been the one constant theme and transformative figure who has walked alongside me on the nomadic, non-teleological journey from where as a researcher I began, to where I am now.

7 By settled/unsettled I mean the work is an open work, open to flows, not a closed system with a neat con- cluded topic. 120 2. Rhizome researchers listen to the voices/things connected to them (assemblages) I interpreted this axiom very literally, in listening to Magda’s voice when she spoke to me in my mind. I also listened to the sounds that the insects around me made, and I listened to recordings of cicadas in Japan, monks chanting and my cat purring. I listened to what was/is going on at this time in late liberal society, and its interplay with the variously labelled Anthropocene, capitalocene,8 necrocene (McBrien 116) or Trumpocene era.9 I listened to the consistent failure to respond to bio- cide and injustice, to the growing dissent and groundswells of anti-fascist/anti-racist/anti-capitalist movements and also the post-secular, transpersonal kind, wherein people are awakening to the trickery of the liberal humanist construct of mind. I listened to my principal supervisor, Dr David Moody, whose work in critical animal studies inspired me from when I first saw his play Elephant Dreaming. And I listened to my own desire to create and to become, a desire which is agentive and beyond representation.

3. Rhizome researchers embed themselves in the lives of their research/students (plane of immanence) I feel that I have been completely embedded in the life of my research, both creative and exegetical, largely though the last axiom: through my listening to assemblages. I have breathed and dreamed this work, from its inception. I am already grieving its completion while also knowing that the larger project of metamorphoses never really ends.

4. Rhizome researchers develop sensitivities to elements/people that are not part of the status quo (deterritorialisation) I respond to this axiom with a piece of writing — a flash fiction trilogy — that I have written, a practice-based line of flight into the way in which I have developed sensitivities to elements/people that are not part of the status quo (deterritorialisation).

8 Jason W. Moore asks, ‘are we really living in the Anthropocene – the ‘age of man’ – with its Eurocentric and techno-determinist vistas? Or are we living in the Capitalocene – the ‘age of capital’ – the historical era shaped by the endless accumulation of capital? (596)

9 Tom Cohen adds (not without irony) to the clamour to name the epoch: “Perhaps an update is due, in “2018,” as we pass beyond that next phase which, if only to break the spell of the A-word, we’ll call the Trumpocene? It marks an acceleration and arrival of what Anthropocene 1.0 had speculated about, largely, and seems to invert and cancel the “Anthropocene” imaginary…” (1) 121 Veni, Vidi, Vici — A flash fiction trilogy by Michelle Braunstein

Veni Had John and I met in a civilised manner, it would’ve been under a cold sky, pinked by morning, our niceties accompanied by plumes of mouth steam. I was on my way to a weird fiction confer- ence. He carried a violin case. The only ones on Oxford Street, except for the ghosts of the night before — boozy shouters, desperate gropers, glass smashers — we marched towards each other. ‘Busker,’ I remarked inwardly, my morning mind not ready for full sentences. Up close, I saw he wore an angry looking gash on his forehead. Closer still, I stared at it and realised a mite too late that I had pissed him off. Quickly, I averted my gaze, but in doing so, missed the broken bottle he clutched in his hand. As I tried to pass him, he lunged at me with it, several times. ‘People are so bad!’ he yelled in my face, the pointed glass shards inches from my neck. Stopped dead, I could see every particle of spit that flew from his mouth, every fleck of moss green in his brown irises, and every scarlet vein in his sclera. He continued to thrust the smashed bottle neck closer and closer to my jugular. ‘They leave their rubbish everywhere! Is this yours?’ Another thrust as punctuation. Time slowed to almost the complete absence of it. I rooted my feet to the spot and called in intelligences of Grandmother Earth. Through me, these intelligences talked him down like he was a five year-old who brandished a carving knife. ‘It’s not mine.’ I told him. ‘But I can throw it away for you. Here?’ I offered my open palms. For some reason, at that moment, I recalled the health recommendation for daily protein intake, to eat no more meat than what can fit on the palm of the hand. I noticed John look at my fingertips reddened with cold. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll do it.’ He relented and stomped away with the broken glass. I looked around to see if any had witnessed my ordeal. But the only ones there, still, were the hungry ghosts from the night before, lurking, leering and thrilling.

122 Vidi On my way to the library one morning, sweet smells of early spring blossoms drifted on the breeze, nudging and tickling my nostrils, daring me to soften into the season. As I walked, I watched a man ahead of me on Broken Head Road stack detritus in a tower, held in the crook of his arm. Every time he’d bend to pick up a piece, he’d drop another. I came up beside him and collected some of what he’d dropped. ‘I cleaned up the whole of Sydney,’ he announced. ‘It was a mess.’ Something about him was familiar and then I noticed the flecks of green in his irises, the scarlet sclera. I looked to his shoulder and saw the violin case slung over it. ‘Were you there last year?’ I asked him. ‘Yes,’ ‘You almost glassed me,’ ‘Did I?’ ‘Yes, I was very scared.’ ‘Sorry,’ he said, although he didn’t sound it. ‘I went to jail for six months ‘cause a lady thought I was going to stab her.’ ‘Interesting,’ I replied, watching the scene play out in the space between us. A knife on the road, in his pocket, in his hand, a woman, thirty, forty, fifty? She would’ve been scared, like I was. A phone call, police, a stinking cell. ‘Have you thought about not thrusting sharp objects at people?’ I suggested. ‘Well, I just pick up rubbish because the glass and the metal on the streets is giving kids parasites.’ ‘I’ve never heard of that, but okay.’ ‘I’m John, anyway. Good to meet you.’ ‘Michelle.’ ‘There’s a nail close by, I can feel it.’ He thrust his trembling hand forward, as though he himself was a metal detector. And he was right, as we rounded the corner, there was a small nail glinting on the road. I picked it up and put it inside an empty chip packet I’d just collected. ‘Make sure you wash your hands, you don’t want to get parasites!’ he warned me. ‘But how…?’ I started to ask, then stopped. European cars streamed past us on their way into Byron. We parted ways and I went to the library. 123 Vici One summer afternoon, the air thick with humidity, I parted company with a friend and walked along the foreshore. A pair of seagulls fought over some abandoned chips and someone, somewhere screamed bloody murder. I’d almost made it past him when I realised the sleeping person in the foetal position on the ground was John. His violin case was nowhere to be seen, nor were any sharp objects. I felt an urge to kick him hard, my anger at him for scaring me that first time, suddenly undigested. Perhaps it was a feeling which could only safely express itself now that he was so obviously unconscious. But I didn't feel like kicking a sleeping man and kept walking.

Fini

The flash fiction trilogy was a practice-based attempt at exploring the axiom proffered by Clarke and Parsons that, “rhizome researchers develop sensitivities to elements/people that are not part of the status quo (deterritorialisation).” Indeed, all of the events in “Veni Vidi Vici” happened during my candidacy. I would argue that the encounters, as informed and framed by the axiom, helped me to develop my sensitivities to both elements and people who are not of the status quo, and supported me to be empowered around a situation that otherwise might have otherwise unnerved me. With my research in mind, particularly its focus on the corporeal, I was able to stay embodied through what occurred in “Veni.” In “Vidi,” I did my best to stay focused on what was immanent, rather than narrativising the encounter. There was never any intelligence in demonising/criminalising John, who, in my view, in the second encounter, was likely more a danger to himself than to anyone else. In “Vici” when I saw him asleep, and thus extra vulnerable, I was able to more fully encounter sensitivity towards both him and myself, and my own feelings about what had happened, and while I may hold quite some privilege as a doctoral student, I also do not identify as being part of the status quo, being a second and third generation refugee from the middle east and eastern Europe who has had voice-hearing encounters. In this sense, the final encounter also helped me in developing sensitivity to elements/people that are not part of the status quo.

5. Rhizome researchers search for research aspects that are sometimes ignored (different affect) The main research aspect that I feel is sometimes ignored, is the project of looking beyond representation, to the force/s which are behind it, a question which I have explored in more depth above in the literature review. Overall however, it is the practice-based, creative part of this project which 124 has been the living, immanent aspect of the methodology. In writing as concretely as possible, without trying to construct transcendent meaning through my practice, I have attempted to write my animal self; a force or an energy that is beyond representation.

6. Rhizome researchers desire a life of becoming rather than copying what is seen This is tricky, because although it is its own story, Order of Our Lady Cicada has also taken its inspiration from the other trickster insect metamorphoses texts that I look at in this thesis. It has also been inspired by my own life of immanent trickster insect metamorphoses/becoming. As a result, I worry that I have erred on the side of copying rather than becoming. However, the nature of the entire dissertation has been such a process of becoming, as specified by the axiom, constantly shifting and unfolding, just as my life has been, occurring around its edges. Most certainly, I desire a life of becoming.

Each and every axiom above has been very helpful to my process, particularly in terms of convert- ing Deleuze and Guattari’s sometimes dense theory into practicable ways of interrogating phenomena.

Phenomenological research Another theoretical paradigm I have engaged with and found useful in my methodological process is phenomenological research. Finlay asserts that phenomenological research is less about conforming to a prescriptive list for its conduct, but rather it is about engaging a phenomenological research sensibility. She sets out a map divided into the following areas:

A) Beginning in silence and seeing afresh B) Dwelling — engaging the minutiae of the data C) Processing the data and pulling together individual analyses

Finlay’s map has guided my approach to this research, with her “beginning in silence” being of particular value. It has become part of my research practice to sit in silence for at least five minutes every day, doing nothing but trying to listen to the spaces between my thoughts. Through this, I feel more capable of thinking, researching/exploring and writing from a place of clarity and embodiment.

125 “Dwelling — engaging the minutiae of the data” has also been a potent method for discovery, although it is not easy, as I have a mind which constantly wants to see a wider picture. Howev- er, drilling down to the insect-sized “data” in the contemporary texts I look at in the thesis has been what has offered me the most insight, which in turn aided me in developing my thesis into an artefact and exegesis which satisfactorily explores the topic at hand. In terms of processing the data and pulling together individual analyses, once again, when looking at the contemporary texts, I took Finlay’s phenomenological research advice into account, and analysed each individual text, also managing to pull them together — at times cross-referencing them —into a cohesive exploration. Further to Finlay’s specific areas outlined above, she outlines how phenomenological research examines the ways in which particular meanings can be woven into a rich description of the phenomenon as a whole. Here the aim is fidelity to the phenomenon as distinct from mere conceptual thematising — above all, it is about the lived experience (121-124). Indeed, my creative writing process and product has been very much about the lived experience, my own life and the worlds I traverse, as my phenomenological muse/s. Also of special significance to my methodological process, Finlay’s article highlights the “transformative power of writing, a central tenet of the phenomenological endeavour” (122). As a writer who is committed to metamorphoses, and given it is also a key theoretical area of the study, I am particularly enamoured with this idea. Related here, Finlay elucidates “languaging:” “transform(ing) analysis into engaging language capable of describing and evoking the phenomenon in all its subtlety and rich layers” (122). As a writer and emerging academic, attempting to “language” is a fairly fundamental part of the process. However, there is much to juggle in success- ful “languaging” in the exegetical context. I must attempt to strike a balance between writing with a certain amount of academic distance from the matter/s, while still owning my own subjectivity, and also not packing sentences with jargon or concepts. Finlay calls me to write transformatively, but with clarity, care and fidelity.

Fictocriticism This leads into ficto-criticism and the way in which I am engaging it as a phenomenological research method, in the liminal zone between my creative work and the exegesis. Kerr positions Barthes as an exemplar practitioner of the hybrid form, and in reference to Haraway, Kerr argues that Barthes “produces a kind of cyborg writing” (93-94). She further articulates that his writing takes place “in among/between criticism, autobiography and fiction” (94), and this is precisely how 126 I have experimented in the final section of this exegesis, in having Magda, the protagonist from Or- der of Our Lady Cicada conduct a close reading of a phantom text, I have written, I Am The Woo, Indeed, beyond having the opportunity to write creatively while being mentored by masters of the craft, Dr David Moody and Dr Simone Lazaroo, I welcomed the opportunity to study creative writing at university because I hoped to work in the zone between both practice and theory, where one could inform the other. Discovering ficto-criticism was something of a watershed moment; it further inspired me to “reappraise, disrupt and partly dismantle the conventions of the science- rhetoric model of scholarship” (Krauth and Watkins). There have been several works of ficto-criticism which have inspired me, the first being “Ficto-Facto Acto — Dicta Depiction” by Jeanne Randolph, which is a ficto-critical work about the form itself, interpolating psychoanalytic theory with art and literary criticism. I have selected the excerpt below, due to its immanent critical animal studies flavour, and also because of the way I/ Magda has tried to play with authenticity and fabrication in our piece:

Aren’t amphibians wondrous? I would love to watch a congo snake slither- ing in its habitat, but I never have. So I don’t know whether congo snakes have always been famous for curling themselves into a Greek lower-case delta. It is possible that taxidermists twist dead congo snakes into a delta position for the aesthetic effect. Is the former more authentic than the latter? I do know when it comes to ficto-criticism (or performances as a psychoan- alyst interpreting Western culture) authenticity is the audience’s problem. I can’t tell the difference between authentic and fake. It’s all fake to me. Evocative ficto-criticism (like the good doctor dispensing conjectures from onstage) could seem an authentic tale to those who long for truth. Or seem like a shameless fabrication to those who long for enchantment. To those who aren’t seeking satisfaction ficto-criticism will appear to oscillate merrily between genuine and phoney.

Magda’s ficto-critical piece, “I Am The Woo,” in the final section of the final chapter of this exegesis is, in part, an abstract/artistic telling of those of my experiences which have informed my writing of Order of Lady Cicada. Indeed it flows between authenticity and shameless fabrication; it was entirely my intent that it “oscillate(s) merrily between genuine and phoney” (Randolph), as a way to keep the trickster at the fore, thus honouring the very topic of this thesis. 127 The other ficto-critical piece that apprehended my imagination and interest is Muecke’s No Road: Bitumen all the way by Stephen Muecke. Although my work does not necessarily resemble it (or Randolph’s either for that matter), it does not need to, given that part of the point of the (de)form is contingency and specificity. Muecke engages nomadism — through discipline, through proximity (to object), through theory and through physical space in No Road. Given that nomadic subjectivities also feature strongly in my own work, I enjoyed the feeling of this work, as it flows seamlessly from one form of narrativising and critique to another. The excerpt below refers to Muecke’s journeys with linguistics: I kept quiet for a bit and thought about language myself. When we write, we sometimes run out of words. This is because we come to the edge of the city of words, where there are no more words left in the place we find ourselves. There are places on the surface of the earth where there are no words at all. There are also places in the heart where words are lost forever. This is not a metaphor. Don’t imagine broken pieces of the alphabet scattered across desert spaces, with tattered, bearded, rag-pickers of the Apocalypse moving slowly, picking them up, trying to piece together systems of meaning. Or inner-city suburbs with broken A-frames, rusted H-girders, O-roundabouts, S-bends. No don’t imagine it. Rather, you drift past the Daily Telegraph building in a taxi; now that’s the spot where words and meanings come from. (21)

This is an exquisitely poetic exemplar of ficto-crticism and it inspires me in my own work, not only for the arrestingly tricky way it deals with linguistics and landscape, but also for how it speaks to one of the main interventions I am working with in this thesis: that which is beyond representation. Here, Muecke also troubles the establishment post-structuralist view that nothing is beyond the text. “This is not a metaphor….no, don’t imagine it” (21) — thus playing with the reader. I am inspired by Muecke’s text as a provocation to un-thinking and deepening corporeal relations with nomadism, and hope that I have been able to bring such an element of tricky play to my own ficto-critical work.

128 Voice-hearing Finally, as part of supporting the ficto-critical element of the research process, I will refer now to an interdisciplinary study of voice-hearing based at Durham University, United Kingdom, called Hearing the Voice, as throughout much of the writing of Order of Our Lady Cicada, I simply transcribed Magda’s voice as heard by my mind’s ear. The Hearing the Voice study has found it has not been uncommon over the ages, for writers to hear the voices of their characters. Patricia Waugh who has been engaged in the project, posits:

Many writers…hear voices and see images so intensely they take on the presence of the real. Many have incorporated such intense “hearsights” (Hi- lary Mantel’s term), with similarly tragic or melancholic or traumatic intensity, and used them as vehicles for addressing experiences such as shell- shock, sexual abuse, slavery, torture and human violation, as well as madness and the sources of creativity in inner experience (think of the echolalic voices of Heart of Darkness, “The Waste Land” or Beloved).

Indeed, images and voices unseen and unheard by others often inspire writers. Relevant to the insect theme in this thesis, and also referred to by Waugh in her article, is the following excerpt from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, which describes Lily’s thoughts in this instance, not as human voices, but as gnats:

All of this danced up and down, like a company of gnats, each separate but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic net — danced up and down in Lily’s mind, in and about the branches of the pear tree… (197)

An article by researcher Peter Garratt, who also participates in the Hearing the Voice project, explains that Dickens was another writer who heard the voices of his characters, reporting, “‘Every word said by his characters was distinctly heard by him,’ one critic stressed in 1872.” It is beyond of the scope of this project to explore in depth, or attempt to explain, this phenomenon; yet it seems important to methodically contextualise its literary precedent, given that I have also experienced it and have deliberately engaged it as a ficto-critical device, beyond the novella and flowing also into the exegetical work.

129 To sum up, in this chapter, I addressed methodology organised beneath the following headings: “agnostic” research, rhizomatic research, phenomenological research, ficto-critical research and lastly, voice hearing. All of these have supported me in mapping (non)representations of metamorphoses, tricksters and insects through seven stories. In the next chapter, I introduce the topics of metamorphoses, insects and tricksters and trace them (non)representationally in two novellas, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphoses and Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild.

130 Chapter three: The Beetle’s Hum

These are strange times, and strange things are happening. Times of ever- expanding, yet spasmodic, waves of change, which engender the simultane- ous occurrence of contradictory effects. Times of fast-moving changes which do not wipe out the brutality of power-relations, but in many ways intensify them and bring them to the point of implosion. — Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses

Metamorphosis, as a concept understood broadly, is a key area of this inquiry, as well as being the title of the first literary text that I will be discussing in my research into (non)representations of insect tricksters and metamorphoses. As outlined earlier in the thesis, I position my research within the context of post-humanism and in one of its accompanying strands, critical animal studies. The exploration undertaken in this project is of (non)representations (that which is beyond representation, in the sense of metamorphoses, desire and the corporeal) of trickster insects in ancient and contemporary stories. However, before launching fully into the chapter, I would first like to highlight once again that I am not attempting to form any rigid conclusions here. The project is more of a critical exploration and is interested in what Deleuze calls “flows” (219), in writing moments of specificity, and in provocation rather than positing frozen (Braidotti 2) conclusions or master narratives. My mapping of (non)representations of metamorphoses, insects and tricksters in this chapter, ‘The Beetle’s Hum’, will address two novellas: Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild. After this, in chapter four, I Heard a Fly Buzz — When I Died, I will explore George Langelaan’s “The Fly”, and the two film versions which are based on it, directed by Kurt Neumann and David Cronenberg. In chapter five, Two Bloods, I will trace (non)representations of metamorphoses, insects and tricksters in my own novella, Order of Our Lady Cicada and those in I Am The Woo, a phantom novella by me, as read by Magda Levy, the protagonist in Order of Our Lady Cicada. I will attempt in all discussions to trace the way representation itself is always aware of the “other” or shadow of the corporeal beyond the text. Therefore, I will also explore corporeal desires 131 which produce trickster representation, but also how these stories act as tricksters themselves; perhaps their concreteness defies abstracted, propositional meaning, just as the trickster also defies being pinned down to any singular meaning and instead holds paradox (Babcock-Abrahams 160-161). Inspired by this paradox myself, I am presenting both a post-structuralist discussion, and an embodied post-humanist one, as a provocation to the former. I will argue that the tension is important, raising the possibilities of what is beyond representation and how texts can act corporeally on us as readers. To clarify further what I mean by the phrase (non)representation, I note again that in interrogating representations of trickster insects in stories, I will be looking less at what these representations mean and more at what they do, an approach consistent with the preference of Deleuze and Braidotti for metamorphosis not metaphor, a vital distinction I draw on throughout this thesis. To explain further the distinction between metaphor and metamorphosis, I interpret metaphor as suggestive of a concept of meaning which is in a sense transcendent (metaphysical, static, disembodied, representational and teleological), and interpret metamorphosis as immanent (mobile, embodied, non-representational and non-teleological). According to Braidotti, “it is important to stress that the anti-metaphysics of the subject proposed by Deleuze is inherently political: it is the kind of thought that aims at reconnecting theory with daily practices of change, transformation and resistance” (124-125). To me, anti-metaphysics is political (and thus significant for my work) as an intervention to the liberal humanist proclivity for overly transcendent and therefore static thought. It is a reclamation of that which is immanent and embodied; a celebration of that which is everyday and flowing. Although it may seem I have a soft spot for that which is immanent, I am also wary of binarising transcendence and immanence, and instead try to look at them as intertwined with one another. This is mirrored in the way that the fictional and the theoretical works that form this dissertation overlap. Later in the exegesis, I very consciously and overtly deform the potential binary of art and theory by engaging a ficto-critical exercise, in which the protagonist from my novella takes an in- tertextual leap into dealing in the topic of (non)representations of tricksters, insects and metamorphoses. Firstly, however, in this chapter, I address two texts by other artists, beginning with Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

132 Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis

A great deal has been written on Franz Kafka’s work, especially on the famous and influential text I am focusing on here, Metamorphosis. Indeed, there have been analyses abounding from structuralist, humanist, post-structuralist and post-humanist frames on this canonical work of literature, some of which I canvass below. These theories exist despite the/my understanding that in so many ways Kafka’s work defies being pinned to any single theory. Sontag agrees, arguing:

the work of Kafka…has been subjected to a mass ravishment by not less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory see desperate revelations of Kafka’s fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thraldom to his dream. Those who read Kafka as a religions allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Jospeh K. in The Trial is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God. (13)

While I clearly cannot address all of the theories by the “armies of interpreters” here, I can problematise and present the ones most relevant to my own exploration of (non)representation of the trickster insect and metamorphosis, insights which tend to inform the exploration beyond representation to the corporeal, to the writing of desire and the body in this important work of Kafka’s. The first critical insight I want to raise as part of this investigation into the difference between metaphor and metamorphosis is that of Walter Sokel, who makes the simple observation that, “Kafka drops the word “like” and has the metaphor become reality when Gregor Samsa wakes up finding himself turned into a giant vermin.” (36) I support Sokel’s position that “Kafka’s uniqueness as a narrative author lies, among other things, in the literalness with which the metaphors buried in linguistic usage come alive and are enacted in scenes he presents” (216). I also agree with Sokel that there is distinctive aliveness and specificity of language in the way that Kafka refuses metaphor, and it is partly this which I find magnetic about his work. This specificity is exemplified well here: “…the rain was still falling, but only in huge drops that could be seen individually” (87). Sokel and I differ though in our reading of the story’s affect and politics. He describes his initial reading of Metamorphosis as a “soul-shaking encounter” (11), which had him “identify with 133 the abysmal suffering depicted in it” (11). While I too found my own initial reading of Metamor- phosis to be “soul-shaking,” this was because I found Gregor’s transformation to be profoundly anarchic, the ultimate transgressive act. Reading abysmal suffering into it, Sokel imposes a humanist position, which prescribes that transforming from human to insect would necessarily be a miserable experience. From this humanist basis, Sokel also extends his steadfastly Marxist reading: “Gregor’s profound self-alienation corresponds, with uncanny precision to Marx’s definition of the “externali- sation” of work under capitalism” (218). He projects alienation onto the existential and literal plane, not merely the metaphorical:

Gregor Samsa’s transformation into vermin presents self-alienation in a literal way, not merely a customary metaphor become fictional fact….no manner more drastic could illustrate the alienation of a consciousness from its own being than Gregor Samsa’s startled and startling awakening. (216)

Observing the literalness of Kafka’s writing, and thus its immanence, has been vital to this dissertation. Sokel’s other points about alienation express a common Marxist stance, particularly when considering Marx’s earlier more humanist writings, such as Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in which he reveals a kind of species narcissism (Benton). As such, I am more compelled by post-humanist readings which transgress the grim “speciesist” (Singer 572) linearity of the Marxist telos with readings of Metamorphosis as more a story of deterritorialisation and becoming in the Deleuzian sense. Nevertheless, I include Sokel’s position — which is emblematic of a whole scholarly movement of thought around Kafka — as I do not wish to throw out the Marxist reading entirely, even as it pertains to alienation. Certainly there are degrees of alienation in all of the insect trickster texts I have read for this project, including the one I have written; however, I also read all of them as being more complex and dynamic than sometimes dour Marxist analyses would specify. Hence, the process of critique I engage here is deconstructionist, immanent and corporeal, still anti-capitalist and anti-hierarchical, but not derived from the transcendent meta-narrative of a humanist version of Marxism. To unpack this, my deconstructive process is informed by Derrida’s approach, which as Eagleton encapsulates, is “an ultimately political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole system of political structures and social institutions, maintains its force” (128). Like Derrida’s aim, but in a more limit- ed way, my exploration of (non)representations of trickster insects in Metamorphosis (and the other 134 trickster insect stories I read) intends on being part of a broader theoretical and political project, aimed at deconstructing western liberalism and rationality through the varying, but related, lenses of post-humanism, New Materialisms and critical animal studies, which are ultimately focused on immanence and the corporeal. And through these theoretical processes, I locate another way of reading Kafka’s story, one which is even more radical and unsettling than any crude Marxist view, going beyond the “alienation” model. Deleuze scholar Colebrook, opining on modernist readings of the text, notes that for such critics, “Kafka’s great story, ‘(The) Metamorphosis’, where Gregor Samsa awakens to find himself transformed into a beetle would be a symbol or allegory of the inhumanity, alienation or displacement at the heart of all finite human life” (138). Further, she expounds that according to Deleuze and Guattari, on the contrary, “the wanderings in Kafka’s texts are positive. There is an intensity or enjoyment of movement itself, of opening doorway after doorway, of crossing space, of burrowing or playing the insect” (138). I support Colebrook’s position, not to extinguish the alienation reading altogether, but to argue that transformation is also possible in diffuse, decentralised and even micro- scopic, insect-sized ways in the context of late liberalism/late capitalism, different both politically and theoretically from the centralised materialist blueprints offered by some modernist models of Marxism. Moreover, Marx’s model is founded on rational materialist conceptualisation, a frame which runs counter to the vein of this project, which heeds Deleuze and Guattari’s intervention on the rational materialist: “a new form of slavery is invented, namely, being slave to oneself, or to pure ‘reason’” (130). Deleuze and Guattari’s problematising of another liberal modernist deity, Freud, is also important to my research, particularly Freud’s conception of the necessity of civilisation to prevent incest (as though it is even effective in doing so!). Deleuze and Guattari present a divergent view to Freud’s triangulated incest theory (Oedipus), which is the reification of a kind of unregulated, “schizophrenic” desire which is deeply subversive to humanist rationality. To expand further on the strictures of reason, Deleuze and Guattari write, “it is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality” (112). Following on from here, and especially relevant to this project, Deleuze and Guattari consider desire as part of this anti-state rebellion:

Despite what some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence — desire, not left-wing holidays! — and no society can toler- ate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude,

135 and hierarchy being compromised…desire does not “want” revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right. (127)

The above recognition of the centrality of desire to life, in the lineage of Nietzschean thought, is useful to my problematising of the liberal humanist construction of mind. Thus, here, I trace back to Nietzsche’s highlighting of the role of thought in relation to desirous drives:

Granted that nothing is “given” as real except our world of desires and passions, that we can rise or sink to no other “reality” than the reality of our drives — for thinking is only the relationship of these drives to one another. (48)

Informed by this and my own experience, I consider thought as in some way a medium or network for desire. The other important point I wish to make here, informed by Nietzsche’s expression above, is that desire, and its home, the body, is a crossroads site for the immanent and the transcendent. Through the body and its array of processes and flows, from bliss to cognition, sacred and profane states are imbricated and can never escape each other. And indeed, as tricksters are known too for standing at the crossroads of the transcendent and immanent, it is timely now to exemplify this sense of embodied trickster insect desire with the following passage from Kafka’s masterpiece:

Gregor crawled a little further forward, keeping his head close to the floor so that it might be possible for their eyes to meet. Was he an animal, that music could move him so? It seemed to him as if the way were opening towards the unknown nourishment he craved. (117)

This passage refers to when Gregor has snuck from his room to hear his sister play violin for their parents and some lodgers who are staying. He is hoping to meet his sister’s eyes, which have a “searching and sorrowful look” (117). This series of moments is particularly fascinating to me for their multiple ambiguities but also for being threshold moments, where the transcendent (being moved by the music) touches the body (crawling). Secondly, there is the wryness of Gregor — now an insect — questioning whether he is an animal, supplying no answer, perhaps in an expression of proto-post-modern irony (Shugart 434). Third, the music is notionally described as opening the way 136 “towards the unknown nourishment he craved” (117). I read this is a moment which signals Gre- gor’s transformation has been totalising, for no longer is there even a fleeting concern for matters regarding the stress of work — he is not craving cloth samples, public transport problems and sales targets. Now (albeit plaintively) he is seeking nourishment in music, in desire and in connection with another. In this sense, it seems he is truly “deterritorialised” (Deleuze and Guattari 9) and becomes fully embodied by his desire, and therefore has transgressed the modernist readings of the text too; that is, the argument that he is constrained by the Oedipal structure. Even against his own conscious hopes, he has transgressed the (patriarchal) family structure. This is reflected in my own story Order of Our Lady Cicada, when the main character Magda transgresses the liberal social order through her nomadic becoming. For both Gregor and Magda, revivifying always already extant desire, and breaking away from liberal humanist reason, is the context for their full metamorphoses. In all of the texts I look at in this thesis, I locate desire-as-agency and transformation as fairly central, especially expressed through (non)representations of trickster insects. I am inquiring through these readings about the desire that is behind or happens through this (non)representation, with the sense that the desire to transform is common to all; and the sense that the characters within are rather more embodied metamorphic processes or events, than entities. Before returning to more specific moments in Kafka’s work where the trickster insect is (non)represented, I will now discuss the connection between trickster and desire, emphasising again that I refer to a Deleuzian conception of desire. The following portion of the discussion also informs subsequent explorations of trickster insects in this thesis. As discussued in this chapter, for Deleuze, against what he sees as the common view, desire is a productive and positive force, not something founded on lack; nor is it something which needs to be controlled or corralled. Dating back to ancient times, tricksters have figured in many stories around the world, and central to most, if not all, is the desire that motivates them. Whether it is desire to simply trick, to transgress, to transform, to break the social order, to have fun, to pass on messages, to lie, to lead astray, to eat, to have sex, to defecate, to entertain, to be at the margins, to annoy — in any case, the tricksters’ (usually unconscious) desires are of utmost importance to the teachings of the story. Also, as Shipley articulates, trickster is (often) “driven by desire while obfuscating personal intent” (20). And very often with tricksters, they remind us of what happens when our left hand does not know what our right hand is doing (Jackson 162). In this sense, they also very often explore and provoke tensions between individual desire and collective goals (Shipley 116). Indeed, there is a sense in which for trickster, desire is desire for

137 the sake of desire. It is non-transitive, not there to do anything specific but trick, and any immediate goal is not the real point. Moreover, and of relevance to Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis, whose “secondary gain” after becoming an insect is that he no longer has to attend a job that makes him miserable, or to support his ungrateful family:

The trickster’s childish impatience, his rapture and joy, his determination to break out of the narrow frame into which he was placed by the system, are all linked to the desire to become oneself — a psychological and intellectual entity that is independent from the social structure. (Bassil-Morozow 5)

In this sense, tricksters are the ultimate schizophrenic rebels (in a Deleuzian sense as outlined above), and if, through their irrepressible desire (again, in terms of Deleuze’s insistence on desire as a positive force), this makes tricksters themselves, like Kafka’s stories, ultimately beyond representation. Significantly, Kafka wrote a short story called “Unmasking A Confidence Trickster” in 1910, and Becker notes that, “in so far as we can think of Kafka as a writer of oblique tales that defy expectation, “common sense,” and easily digestible glosses, he resembles the figure of the trickster” (101). Becker also refers to “The Hunger Artist,” another short story by Kafka:

Like trickster characters throughout world mythology, Kafka and his hunger artist are boundary figures, functioning as intermediaries between life and death, text and meaning, art and artists, parable and intelligible allegory. (107)

Indeed, Metamorphosis is no exception to Becker’s observation, albeit a more earnest version of the ancient symbol and performative archetype, as we can see here in the following monologue expressed by Gregor’s manager, “the chief clerk”:

“Herr Samsa,” the chief clerk now called out, raising his voice, “what’s the matter with you? Here you are barricading yourself in your room, giving only yes or no for an answer, causing your parents a great deal of unneces- sary anxiety, and besides — I merely mention this in passing — neglecting 138 your duties towards the firm in a positively outrageous manner. I am speaking here in the name of your parents and your employer, and I must ask you in all seriousness to give me clear and immediate explanation. I am astonished, astonished. I had always taken you for a quiet and reasonable young man, and now you suddenly seem bent on parading these peculiar whims.” (Kafka 83-84)

Here, Gregor’s rebellion is entirely embodied. He is not resisting with words or with thoughts. To all intents and purposes, he has barricaded himself in from the world of liberal humanist “duties” (83), as the chief clerk accuses him of doing. Further, Kafka’s story is powerfully unsettling in its depiction of Gregor as an earnest trickster. Perhaps this is the most tricky writing performance of all, and the most transformative, for although Gregor attempts at times to compromise and fit back into his pre-insectoid world, he never can. He is a trickster through and through, in his very existence, not just rebellious in his isolated actions, but down to the corporeal. It matters not what his disembodied mind thinks of whom or what he is; he has “become” and can never go back. However, if we consider for a moment the tricky thoughts that Gregor thinks, there is evidence too that his physical exhaustion before his insectoid metamorphosis causes him to covet, or desire a different, more rebellious life. Early in the text, he compares himself in his under-slept state to other travellers:

A man needs his sleep. Other travellers live like harem women. For instance, when I go back to the hotel during the morning to write up the orders I’ve taken, these gentlemen are still sitting over their breakfast. If I tried that with my chief I’d be sacked on the spot. (77)

In this passage, despite the wantonness and immorality (from the perspective of his chief) of those who work under more relaxed conditions than he, Gregor’s exhaustion causes him to envy them. He also implies that it is only through the coercion of his labor relations with his chief that he does not also “live like harem women” (77). While there are obvious feminist and Marxist interpretations possible here of both Gregor’s real life employment and his “harem woman” metaphor (a rare metaphor in Metamorphosis), I am reading it through the immanent, queerer lens of embodied trickster desire. Insect Gregor’s desire to be a “harem woman” whom (whether this is an apt repre- 139 sentation or not), according to him, exists mainly in a state of permanent leisure and pleasure, reveals much about the character’s embodied desire and its expression through his trickster, perhaps latently transgendered self. But perhaps such extrapolation comes undone when again considering the real immanent trickery in Kafka’s work: his writing’s constant defiance of settled or easy meaning. To return to the point I made before my discussion of Gregor’s tricky thoughts, Becker also points to the trickery in Kafka’s work with focus on meaning, representation and language:

Like Hermes, the archtrickster and messenger of Greek mythology, Kafka stands between our experience of reading his tales and the rarified significance we (often) presume they possess. For Kafka, parables that point un- equivocally to the sacred wisdom they are meant to demonstrate do so un- truthfully; only through indeterminate, playful language can we begin to confront what is beyond our experience. (107)

Becker’s point is important: that in effect, Kafka uses deception in his storytelling to make readers unsure of what he is meaning, thereby stimulating further thought of the Other, and of that which is in excess of transcendent thought. Kafka’s kind of tricky defiance to the established order of meaning-making is the nub of this project. Author Hanif Kureishi's writing on Kafka is also significant, referring to “the intrinsic anarchy of real writing” and the capacity of those writers always on the outside, to undermine systems such as Marxism, Nazism or religion: “the hysterics, masochists, bugs and self-starvers, despite their wish to be nothing, just would not fit into any comfortable place, always making people work to think about what they might signify” (14). Indeed, in this project, my focus is on that which defies easy signification or encapsulation and Kureishi notices, as I and others do, that Kafka’s work never makes a comfortable fit with transcendent theorem. Moreover, Lewis Hyde, a postmodern specialist on the trickster in myth and literature, comments:

Kafka is saying that meaning (the truth, the Law, the single sense) is like a brief radiance glimpsed on the far side of a door that one cannot go through. The things we try to understand nowadays have “intermittent radiances” only, and these are “uninterpretable.” (288) 140 While Becker conceptualises Kafka as standing between story and meaning, and Kureishi sees him as an outsider embracing a certain anarchy and discursive discomfort, Hyde’s take is more that Kaf- ka comments on the ungraspable quality of meaning. All three thinkers’ ideas run with the critical animal studies current, particularly Weil’s work, where she refers to animals as unknowable or “incalculable” others (14). Indeed, Kafka deals with this insight particularly in his conclusion to Metamorphosis. Here, true to Hyde’s observation, through his depiction of the Samsa family’s quiet continuing on with life, Kafka subtly hints that perhaps they have learned nothing at all from Gregor’s metamorphosis. The ambiguity of the ending,10 according to Braidotti, is an indicator that it is a work of minoritarian literature, because it is “anti-Oedipal, in so far as it resists…the totalising influence of the narrative closure” (127). There is no calculated or calculable capsule of meaning to be swallowed at the end, leaving readers satisfied that they know what the story is about. In terms of further non-representational traces and territories of the trickster in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the next part of my discussion concerns the text’s soundscape. Jessica Smith’s article, “Sonic territories: Deleuze and the politics of sound in Kafka and Duras,” deals with the dynamics of oppression through sound in various Kafka texts, bringing her reflections on this together with those on the politics of music in texts by Deleuze and Guattari (1-73). Smith revises Deleuze and Guattari’s “concept of sonic mapping for productive readings of Kafka’s Metamorphosis” (v) and is particularly interested in clashes between chaotic and ordered sounds. To me this clash zone is the terrain of the trickster, and whereas Smith writes mainly about representation of gender and how “authors use sound to indicate the weakness of the boundary between the empowered and the oppressed in the political terrains their novels describe” (v), my analysis is more concerned with how sound interacts with the non-representational, and the desire that drives the trickster insect as an agent of transformation and as a “multi-layered dynamic subject” (Braidotti 118). Smith’s work

10A key question is, does the family care or not care about what happens to Gregor? The ending is superfi- cially optimistic and disquieting at once:

Their tramcar, in which they were the only passengers, was filled with warm sun- shine. Leaning comfortably back in their seats they discussed their prospects for the time ahead, and it appeared on closer inspection that these were by no means bad. (125)

While it is only a snapshot in time with no narrative on their inner emotional states and thus it is ambiguous, there is the definite possibility that the Samsas have returned to the indifferent, banal evil of liberal humanism, as though it had never been overturned, momentarily, within the bounds of their own familial structure; as though they had never murdered their own child. 141 does, however, cross into the realm of that which is beyond representation, and she makes some points which are useful to my thesis, the first of which is that she is interested in Deleuze and Guat- tari’s assertion that:

…what interests Kafka is a pure and intense sonorous material that is always connected to its own abolition — a deterritorialised musical sound, a cry that escapes signification, composition, song, words — a sonority that rup- tures in order to break away from a chain that is still all too signifying. In sound, intensity alone matters, and such sound is generally monotone and always nonsignifying. (6)

Here, Deleuze and Guattari could be referring to the sound of a single mosquito in a bedroom at night, its buzz rupturing silence and drilling irrational fear and profound irritation into the heart of the prone human. Also, sound which escapes signification speaks here to my focus on metamorphosis as distinct from metaphor. Indeed, Kafka emphasises the transformation of Gregor’s voice, and its very concrete shift: “‘Did you hear how Gregor was speaking just then?’ ‘That sounded like an animal,’ said the chief clerk, in a tone that was strikingly subdued compared to his mother’s shrieking” (85). We read here a moment of irony too, as Gregor’s noise is charged as being animal, when his mother is actually the one who is shrieking. And further:

Gregor gave a start when he heard his own voice as of old, but mixed in with it, as if from below, was an irrepressible, painful squeaking; and this only left the sound of the words clear for a moment, before distorting them so much that one could not tell if one had heard them properly. (78)

When reading this passage, I experience a delicious liquid trickery in how the situation sits at the threshold, the mixing in “from below.” The words are “clear for a moment” before they are ruptured to the point of confusion. Gregor’s embodied desire, that which is beyond representation, remains at the threshold of human and animal, both representational and non-representational. This desire is expressed through the form and intensity of his expression rather than in the content itself. Here, too, Gregor is breaking from the Oedipal/patriarchal prism of his family and workplace, with his voice as an embodied agent of that scission. I would argue that Kafka did the same with his actual writing. The very trickery of it was more a potent expression of dissent than an overt quarrel

142 with what was wrong with the world: what has come to be known as the “Kafkaesque” conditions of industrial capitalism. Sokel reminds us, too, that Kafka considered writing as prayer (168), which, considering his disaffection for his father’s materialism (Bridgewater 2), suggests that his process was indeed a kind of spiritual rebellion. Unpacking the excerpt above further, the qualification “but mixed in with it, as if from below, was an irrepressible, painful squeaking” is very abstruse and a contradiction in terms, as “below” at first implies that it was a low register, but “squeaking” implies a higher one. This leaves me, the reader, with the sense that Kafka is not at all referring to pitch when he writes “below” and I wonder if instead he means something more dimensional, a kind of hell. Here I read a possible reference to the plane of immanence. To me, Gregor has fallen, like Lucifer, to his liberation from the oppression of transcendent narratives about family and work. The change in Gregor’s voice is the first stone cast, the primary indicator to himself, his family and his chief that something about him is no longer what it was. In another part of the story, he tries his best to reassure his family that there is nothing to be concerned about: “‘I’m just coming’ said Gregor by way of reply in both directions, doing his best to make his voice sound as normal as possible” (79). Indeed, he does his best, which again points to the earnestness of his trickery, to how embodied his rebellion is, to how his left hand does not know what his right hand is doing, and to how truly schizophrenic and beyond representation the insect Gregor is. My final thoughts in this thesis on Kafka’s Metamorphosis (although there is so much more that I could say which is beyond its scope, relate to Kureishi’s contribution on the author. Although I find Kurieshi’s approach overly analytic (in a Freudian sense), and not written from a life-affirming post-human position, it still makes an interesting point about reading Metamorphosis from the perspective of the artist:

Metamorphosis is not merely a tale of how mad, envious, indifferent or just ordinary parents can limit a child's imagination and sense of possibility. Kaf- ka’s texts, unlike his relationships, are endlessly fertile and open. No artist knows quite what they’re saying: the world blows through them, and, if they’re lucky, they might catch a scrap of it, which they will shape and remake, but without entirely grasping the entire truth of the thing. Saying and meaning are never the same. Hence, Metamorphosis can be read differently, the other way round entirely. 143 There are manifold ways into Metamorphosis, and I close this segment of the chapter with Kureishi's words to support the idea that my views on Kafka are simply an exploration from a particular set of angles (mine) and I do not claim to package up and present any truths about (non)representations of trickster insect, the body or desire in Metamorphosis. I certainly would argue that in my own fiction writing on trickster insect metamorphosis, meaning is tricky and always shifting. If there is ever a particular point I am trying to represent in my work, it is usually unstable; hence I try to focus more on the corporeal qualities of what I am writing about. My interest is in attempting to go beyond meaning and into a more embodied non-representational process with my research, in the realms of both theory and practice. As I have previously discussed, it is this indeterminacy and incalculability which is characteristic of artists, tricksters and animals alike; although this might, to some extent, undermine the clear significance of the academic discussion I am attempting. Some may wonder, “why even have this discussion if we can never know?” To this I would respond that the thesis is more provocation than conclusion, and that I am not trying to create any territory which is fixed or concrete. Rather, as Braidotti says: “theory today happens ‘in transit’” (173), moving on, passing through, creating connections where things were previously disconnected or seemed unre- lated, where there seemed to be “nothing to see” (173). My take on Kafka’s Metamorphosis is to be read in this vein.

Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild

I continue my discussion of trickster insect metamorphosis by now looking at Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild. This novella tells of a community of humans (Terrans) who have attempted to colonise a faraway planet due to the environmental impossibility of remaining on earth. On the new planet, after initial resistance by the local population of insectoid life-forms (Tlics), a deal has been struck between the present generations of each species, whereby, in a post-human vision, the males of the Terrans species become hosts for the reproduction of the Tlic’s offspring. In exchange, the Tlics allow the Terrans to exist on their planet within a context of relative, yet still somewhat tense, coop- eration. The Tlic species have the ability to pacify Terrans with a narcotic that they apply with a sting or by offering their (sterile) eggs for the Terrans to drink. This substance helps unite the two species around the common cause of mutli-species reproduction, against a backdrop of general political unease and remnant (from previous generations) resistance.

144 There are numerous ways into this novella, the more common analyses being on intersections of gender, race and slavery in particular. Contemporary critical exemplars are Alys Eve Wein- baum’s “The Afterlife of Slavery and the Problem of Reproductive Freedom” and “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Slavery?” by Kristen Lillvis. The latter looks especially to the historical, ancestral relations between species, established before the main part of the story unfolds, as being the site for a slavery allegory; a reading of the story that is perceptive and powerful. A number of theorists of Bloodchild also assert that the novella in its entirety is a direct ana- logue for slavery; for example Jeffrey Allen Tucker, in his chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature, argues that “readings of Bloodchild as a neo-slave narrative remain compelling” (257). Vizenor’s rejection of the liberal tendency for reading writings by American In- dians as stories about oppression — “Native resistance to dominance is an undeniable trace of presence, but even these memories of survivance in a constitutional democracy are cast as narratives of absence and victimry” (23) — provokes me to challenge the more common reading and look at what else might be happening in Butler’s work besides a slavery allegory. Some have raised queer perspectives on Bloodchild: Amanda Thibodeau and James Tiptree Junior address Butler’s depiction of non-normative inter-species encounters and, in the ultimate trans scenario, the birthing of Tlic offspring by male Terrans. Given greater scope, I would have liked to have explored these readings in more depth; however, yet another possible way of reading Bloodchild, and one which is comparatively and compellingly in greater alignment with the aims of my thesis than the other readings I have introduced, is the conception of human/animal relations in the story as a kind of intersectionality, which Magnone explicates in her paper, “How to Love Your Livestock: Negotiating Domestic Partnership in the Multispecies World of “Bloodchild”. On But- ler’s work in general, she says that in it:

humans are never alone; they share their lands, cultures, families, and bodies with members of very different species. Alongside and often linked to gender, race, class, and ability, species emerges as one of many kinds of ontological difference foregrounded in her work. (1)

Magnone argues that thriving in Bloochild is enabled through multi-species partnership, an argument that I want to explore further. Firstly, however, I note that, while interpretations which exceed the author’s own stated intentions are also valid, I am especially interested in Butler’s own. She writes of Bloodchild that: 145 …on one level, it’s a love story between two very different beings. On another, it’s a coming-of-age story in which a boy must absorb disturbing information and use it to make a decisions that will affect the rest of his life. On a third level, Bloodchild is my pregnant man story… Also, Bloodchild was my effort to ease an old fear…about the botfly.” (30)

She further explains that writing the novella was therapeutic for her due to her phobia of botflies in Peru and their laying of eggs under the skin of mammals (30). As I also mentioned in the literature review, Butler speaks of the story as less about parasitism and more about “paying the rent,” a view which implies that there is in the story a version of co-operation occurring between the “alien” and human species. There is also obvious trickster irony at play here about who is local and who is alien. I read Butler’s depiction of this exchange in the novella as in alignment with her conscious intent, and I would extrapolate from it further discussion about multi-species embodied symbiosis. Notwithstanding, I would also problematise her notion of rent-paying in the context of a larger an- archo-communist quarrel with the notion of private property as a form of coercion (Proudhon 11), and I locate the relation between the two species — human and insectoid alien — more in the context of mutual aid than of capitalist exchange. Indeed, the relationship between human and insectoid alien in Bloodchild is symbiotic, albeit tricky, and one which thrives outside of liberal, humanist, capitalist frames. That Butler may have been bound by the liberal frame in her own analysis of “exchange” within the text does not take away from the possible reading of it as a post-humanist or anarchist text. So too, the relations in the novella between what could simplistically be read as oppressed and oppressor, subject and object, are potentially a great deal more complex and dynamic than this. I expand on this later in the chapter, but first I am going to attempt, as I have done in the previous section with Kafka’s Metamorphosis, to focus on (non)representations of trickster and embodied desire in Bloodchild. As part of interrogating the (non)representations of tricky symbiotic encounter between species in the novella, I want to adapt Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualisation of the rhizome as a method to do so. To begin, I must first expand on the notion of the rhizome, further to my initial exploration in the literature review. As I noted earlier, the botanical term originates as a classification of such plant species as ginger, turmeric, galangal, bamboo and couch grass. Common to each species is their development through many roots, growing horizontally through a chaotic anti-structure, as distinct from the upwards, comparatively transcendent developmental trajectories of other 146 arborescent species. Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus extend rhizome’s multi-nodal “becomings” to many aspects of existence, particularly writing. They hold:

the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organising memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states. What is at question in the rhizome is a relation to sexuality—but also to the animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural and artificial—that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all manner of “becomings” (1).

My understanding of rhizome is that it is immanent and not transcendent and thus wholly relevant to the aims of this project. It also follows that Deleuze and Guattari are suspicious of arborescent metaphors because “multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are” (8). Their discussion is also useful to my process here in exploring (non)representations of trickster in Bloodchild, as I find similarities between their concept of the rhizome and the figure of the trickster, who also exposes “pseudomultiplicities,” or hierarchies in any form. Indeed, “mythological and folk tricksters typically show little respect for the existing hierarchy, often attempt to redefine success and like to reverse or challenge social status” (Bassil-Mo- rozow 9). I will expand further on how this works in the novella below, but for now, to illustrate how rhizome has been applied beyond multi-tubular root plants, Deleuze and Guattari give the example of the orchid and the wasp, which “as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome” (11). This multispecies relationship involves a kind of trickery by the orchid in orchestrating the wasp to mate with it by appearing and behaving as another wasp. The result of its trickery is the propagation of its seed. Indeed, as Deleuze and Guattari hold, “at the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp” (11). Hyde too writes about various tricky animal species, such as the octopus, who “darkens the water with a jet of ink” (48) in order to catch prey. However, Hyde makes the point that it is important not to conflate “natural history with mental and cultural phenomena” (57), in that tricky animals are not actually tricksters, as “their deceptions lack the plasticity of human deceit” (57). Here he refers to the lack of reflection by animals upon their own tricks (57).

147 Hyde’s point has a degree of merit and to an extent it informs the way I look more to the rhizomatic trickiness of the encounter between the particular species of orchid and wasp. Similarly I read trickiness in T’Gatoi’s (alien/insect) and Gan’s (human) mutually beneficial encounter in Bloodchild more than I look to trickiness inherent in T’Gatoi as a non-human being. Yet I will not fully affirm Hyde’s position that animals are not capable of deceit, and I find his binarising of nature and culture problematic. In contrast to it, I recognise recent attempts in critical animals studies to reclaim anthropomorphism as a strategy of imaginative border writing. From this more deeply post-humanist standpoint I ask if animals can be consciously tricky and even deceitful. Along the same lines, Jane Bennett in her important text, Vibrant Matter, challenges the ab- solute division of subject and object — a logic which censures anthropomorphism — and looks more for a revised version of it, which deals in similarities rather than differences:

An anthropomorphic element in perception can uncover a whole world of resonances and resemblances — sounds and sights that echo and bounce far more than would be possible were the universe to have a hierarchical structure…A touch of anthropomorphism, then, can catalyse a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form con- federations. (99)

Moreover, Derek Ryan, in his treatise on discourses around animal encounters considers that “literary fiction provides an ideal form to consider the pitfalls and potential of anthropomorphism” (41). Given this, I would argue that all of the creative texts I am looking at in this thesis indeed provide this opportunity through their human/insect encounters and hybridities which play with subjectivity/ objectivity in the human/animal relation. In Bloodchild, Gan’s and T’Gatoi’s symbiotic encounter also demands analysis of non-representational trickster desire, an intervention I made earlier in this chapter in relation to Kafka’s Metamorphosis. As such, I read T’Gatoi and Gan’s encounter as being a kind of sensuous, desirous becoming, an instance of “initiation” also acknowledged by Butler in her afterword. We can read the sensuousness and desire in the following lines expressed through the first person point of view of the protagonist Gan, “…several of T’Gatoi’s limbs secured me closer. T’Gatoi liked our body heat and took advantage of it whenever she could” (3). And as well, “I lay against T’Gatoi’s long, velvet underside, sipping from my egg now and then” (3). In particular, it is the language Butler 148 chooses — “body heat,” “velvet” and “sip” — which reveal a certain non-representational corporeality between the characters. And through this comes the trickery, the cathartic becoming, particularly the sipping of the egg and the narcotic stings from T’Gatoi: “Freed by the egg and the sting, she [Lien, Gan’s mother] would smile and perhaps say things long held in” (7). Indeed, Gan, Lien and the other Terrans become intoxicated, and with lowered ego defences, are able to commune more deeply, more rhizomatically with their lover-like alien counterparts. Rather than likening this chemical state to deadened, acquiescent inebriation caused by Huxley’s Soma — “all the advan- tages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects” (37) — I would consider it a more liminal state like that catalysed by the original Soma, the mysterious plant/elixir/deity of ancient Indo-Iran- ian cultures (Brereton), a multispecies, possibly transformative ambrosia. The suggestion here by Butler is that the Terrans/humanist mind has the potential to be expanded and liberated by the experience of drinking the egg, not made dully complicit. There is the sense that the egg is entheogenic in its giving of a certain kind of energy, which enables one who imbibes it to locate perspective and reflexivity:

The small amount of fluid that came into me with her egg relaxed me as completely as a sterile egg would have, so that I could remember the rifle in my hands and my feelings of fear and revulsion, anger and despair. I could remember feelings without reviving them. I could talk about them. (29)

There is even a suggestion that the effect of the egg would offend the rational mind, when after Lien’s drinking of the egg and being stung, the narration notes: “…tomorrow, she would remember all this as a humiliation” (Butler 7). The important point to be made here is that the rhizomatic relations between Tlic and Ter- rans in Bloodchild are characterised by a certain complexity; it is not necessarily a straight case of one class dominating/drugging another into compliance. It is also important to note that the protagonist family is an exception to the way in which the majority of Tlic/Terrans relations play out in the new society as far as we know from the narrative. This difference has everything to do with T’- Gatoi’s cunning protectiveness (if we are to believe that Gan’s perspective is well-founded), and I referred to this important moment earlier in the thesis: “T’Gatoi was hounded on the outside. Her people wanted more of us made available. Only she and her political faction stood between us and the hordes…” (5).

149 The protagonist family’s multispecies relations captured my imagination sufficiently that I explore how this rhizomatic complexity operates as a key theme of the novella; the queer/BDSM/ kink dance that the two species perform around and with each other in play, pseudo-resistance/ bondage, seduction and ultimately mutuality. On the surface, Gan’s resistance seems partially due to his witnessing of the birthing of Tlic via the Caeserean-like vivisection of a N’Tlic — an impregnated male Terran (12) — who T’Gatoi brings to Gan’s family’s house in an attempt to save the N’Tlic from being consumed by the Tlic larvae inside him, and also to save the T’lic larvae itself (17). What is interesting about this from my perspective is the way in which the matter is resolved. While some may observe a level of coercion by T’Gatoi, and even from Gan’s family, who under law must offer up one family member to this implantation process, generally a biological male, there is a moment of embodied surrender by Gan. This act of acceptance does not seem to be out of any kind of transcendent sense of moral righteousness or self-sacrifice, as his sister has already agreed to take his place, thus granting him dispensation from the impregnation process. Rather it is out of desire that Gan makes this autonomous movement towards the multi-species rhizomatic partnership with T’Gatoi, towards becoming. A further instance in the novella where Gan and T’Gatoi’s relationship reveals itself as one of rhizomatic bodily becoming and trickery, is described here:

“You’re better,” she said this time, probing me with six or seven of her limbs. “You’re gaining weight finally. Thinness is dangerous.” The probing changed subtly, became a series of caresses. (Butler 4)

The trickery is in the paradox of T’Gatoi’s bodily expression; she is both Other (probe) and lover (caress). Moreover, the same sort of ambiguity exists in the beautifully written passage where Gan’s mother Lien and T’Gatoi, vexed though their relationship may be, also share some intimacy: “she lay down now against T’Gatoi, and the whole left row of T’Gatoi’s limbs closed around her, holding her loosely, but securely” (6). Again two contradictory states co-exist; loose, but secure. I read this as an embodiment of emotional intelligence; a paradox which is not the work of an oppressor, but rather that of someone (or something!) who is instrumental to mutualism. I refer to instrumen- tality here as, once again, I am not suggesting that the characters (or indeed Butler) are motivated by lofty ideas of what is right in terms of any kind of transcendent morality. This retrains focus from metaphor to metamorphosis, particularly because, after an initial period of conflict between Terrans and Tlic (12), although relations are still tense, they are trans- 150 formed to reach a degree of pragmatic mutualism; of multispecies entanglement more than a master/slave relation. No-one seems to be standing on principle or hierarchy, but rather, on what works in a multispecies context. I would relate this to the words of Haraway, who says in her important text, A Cyborg Manifesto:

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. This cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. (150)

I read the symbiotic relations between Terrans and Tlic as tracing and provoking a kind of cyborg ontology. Another aspect of Bloodchild which contains the fingerprints of the trickster is the depiction of T’Gatoi as messenger and go-between for both the Terrans and Tlics. This is present in the following quotation which I have already mentioned with regard to a previous point:

T’Gatoi was hounded on the outside. Her people wanted more of us made available. Only she and her political faction stood between us and the hordes who did not understand why there was a Preserve — why any Terran could not be courted, paid, drafted, and in some way made available to them. Or they did understand, but in their desperation, they did not care. (Butler 5)

T’Gatoi’s position between “us and the hordes” (Butler 5) is a classic locus for a trickster. As we never meet any other Tlics besides T’Gatoi in the story, we cannot be sure if Gan’s narration is strictly a reliable one or perhaps even tricky itself. His lack of certainty about whether the Tlics understand the Terrans’ plight or not reveals a certain degree of tricky ambiguity. Further on trickery and reliability, T’Gatoi does not always play an honest game with Gan and his family. However, rather than try to commit to one interpretation of the story or another, I am going to focus more on Butler’s placement of T’Gatoi in the middle, as both insider and outsider; another typical zone of trickster. In terms of invoking a trickster who reminds me of T’Gatoi’s insider/outsider position in the text, here I am reminded of Eshu, the West African trickster, who according to Hyde, “as go-between he’s kind of static on the line, a connector who may or may not connect, a reminder that all responses obscure as they enlighten” (16). 151 As an insider/outsider trickster, T’Gatoi, ambiguously for her own ends or those around her, or both, “oversaw the joining of families, putting an end to the final remnants of the earlier system of breaking up Terran families to suit impatient Tlic” (5). It is clear here the extent to which relations have transformed in the society; an optimistic progression from T’Gatoi’s comparatively more visionary tendency towards mutualism would be that these transformed relations grow and spread among her people like an irrepressible rhizome such as bamboo, although Butler offers us no certainty that this will occur. This novella is already rhizomatic and minoritarian in itself; not a closed system with a totalising neat conclusion. While I do read some sense of peace in the conclusion in the coming together of species, it is just a beginning rather than an ending. In any case, there is at least the suggestion here that T’Gatoi’s trickery is also transformative of the society she is in. In- deed, as Helen Lock states, the “trickster’s trickery calls into question fundamental assumptions about the way the world is organised, and reveals the possibility of transforming them [the assumptions] (even if often for ignoble ends)” (3). Again, are T’Gatoi’s ends noble or ignoble? I would (trickily) argue both and neither, for the story does not require that we choose. Previous discussion in this Bloodchild section of the chapter has touched on embodiment, but now I will explore it in more depth with particular reference to embodied trickery. In the section above on Metamorphosis, I have also addressed Kafka’s expression of the relationship between embodiment and the trickster insect. In Bloodchild, speaking of T’Gatoi, the insetoid life-form who plays out the role of the trickster, Gan observes, “…when she moved that way, twisting, hurling herself into controlled falls, landing running, she seemed not only boneless, but aquatic — something swimming through the air as though it were water. I loved watching her move” (9). This to me is reminiscent of Kafka’s insect trickster Gregor who as I mentioned above, also demonstrates a kind of embodied trickster liquidity in his voice, both from below and high at once (78). Further, Butler refers again to a certain embodied kind of trickster liquidity in T’Gatoi’s movement: “Sometimes she moved so smoothly she seemed to flow like water itself” (23). This summons the Sumerian trickster associated with water Enki (Pettinato 2791-2792) as well as the trickiness of the substance itself, always moving. Thibodeau also writes on T’Gatoi’s tricky corporeality in her exposition of the novella:

The particular combination of bodily traits signifies to the reader both mon- strosity and humanity. The snake coils, along with the insect legs, stinger, and body segments, conjuring images of serpents, scorpions, and cock-

152 roaches, indicate a grotesque and terrible power while the heart-shaped face and graceful movements imply intelligence and beauty. (269) Such paradox, defying easy or static representation, is indeed a feature of many tricksters. Significantly, as in Kafka’s text, embodied trickery in Bloodchild is also present in the sonic landscape: “she made a lot of little clicking sounds when she walked on bare floor, each limb clicking in succession as it touched down. Waves of little clicks.” (23) The word “click” is used thrice in two sentences and onomatopoeically it becomes its own synaesthetic trick as the letters on the page sound in my ears. I have previously highlighted in the above section on Metamorphosis, Smith’s articulation on the use of sound to indicate the fluidity of the boundary between the empowered and the oppressed (v). In this context, I am exploring the ways in which this threshold zone that Smith speaks of, between oppressed and oppressor, is a possible context for a sonic trickster in Bloodchild too. Hence the sound of T’Gatoi’s clicks here in that tricky zone, particularly in their manifestation as waves, are another reference to liquidity. It is the elegance of the waves of clicks juxtaposed with the grotesqueness of the giant insectoid life form, T’Gatoi, who is making them, which also con- jures the trickster, paradoxical in perpetuity. Finally, T’Gatoi’s embodied trickery finds another fascinating expression: “after a moment, she looked up at me, her sudden stillness a sign of deep impatience” (10). I would ordinarily consider stillness a sign of patience rather than its opposite, and yet Butler tricks here by depicting a large insectoid creature, who is normally in fluid motion, as expressing her impatience in a moment of stasis.

In the next chapter, I will explore (non)representations of trickster insect and metamorphoses in George Langelaan’s “The Fly”, and the two film versions which are based on it, directed by Kurt Neumann and David Cronenberg.

153 Chapter four: I Heard a Fly Buzz — When I Died

This chapter explores tricksters and insectoid metamorphoses in three inter-texts: “The Fly” a short story by George Langelaan; the 1958 film which was inspired by it, also called The Fly, directed by Kurt Neumann; and the 1986 film version also of the same title, directed by David Cro- nenberg. While there are some extant post-humanist readings of the short story and the films which have been inspired by it, there has been no research heretofore addressing the interplay of tricksters, insects and metamorphoses, or of that which is beyond representation in the concreteness or corporeality of the text, and so I will explore these tensions within each piece. Indeed, much of the focus has been on what the images in these texts mean and represent, whereas, consistent with the other parts of this study, I will focus more on metamorphoses rather than metaphor. In doing so, I will honour the texts’ “lines of flight,” and predominantly address them as modes of metamorphosis itself, rather than treating the works as metaphors of abstract ideas, as others such as Bruce Clarke and Ernest Mathijs have. There will be times where I do address representation and metaphor, as these artworks are too richly textured for me not to. Firstly, I will discuss Langelaan’s short story “The Fly,” then its 1958 film adaptation, and finally, the 1986 film version. Throughout the discussion, I will make some comparative comments about all three texts. As in the previous sections, I consider “human” in this thesis as the liberal humanist subject constructed by Enlightenment theorists, and the post-human process I invoke is a provocation to this. It is also a challenge to the post-structuralist position expressed in Derrida’s much discussed, and misunderstood comment, “there is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text; il n’y a pas de hors-texte]” (158). My post-humanist intervention provokes Derrida’s theory through attempting to acknowledge and map that which is beyond representation, rather than just accepting that we never can. In my study of (non)representation, I am seeking to explore (but not conclude about) the qualities of tricksters and insectoid metamorphosis present in the three versions of “The Fly,” expressed mainly through the corporeal. As I have touched on in the above sections, this is not about romanticising the body, or trying to cleave off the mind from the body, for how could I? It is only the (apparently disembodied) mind which is capable of perceiving itself as separate or separable. 154 Rather, this exploration attempts to track footprints of the trickster and metamorphosis, mostly not as expressed through representation but through corporeality; through the author’s and directors’ devices, and perhaps at times even through something less conscious and intentional than this: the "lines of flight" or energies of artistic process itself.

George Langelaan’s “The Fly”

Bruce Clarke classifies the 1957 short story “The Fly” by George Langelaan’s as “modern mythology,” which spurred “collective fabulation” in its “continuations and variants” (169) — films, sequels and even an opera of the same name and basic story (Tommasini). From my perspective, the powerful short story is indeed worthy of its latter day cinematic interpretations, though readings of their sequels are beyond the reach of this paper. The original story by George Langelaan is narrated by Francois, whose brother André has been murdered.11 Inside Francois’s narration is a letter written by his sister-in-law Hélène, who con- fesses to the murder of her husband, André. She tells of how scientist André invented a machine which is capable of transmitting matter from one place to another. André experiments on a variety of objects and pets, and even though he loses the family cat somewhere in the liminal zone between disintegration and reintegration, he also places himself in the machine, only to unwittingly and simultaneously transmit a fly. The botched process seems to fuse Andre and the fly together, and later, trying at Hélène’s insistence to undo the previous mistake, some features of the lost cat also mani- fest in a new fusion with his insectoid form. Thus André becomes a hybrid: a partly humanoid creature with insectoid and feline features. Also, buzzing somewhat elusively around the family’s house and garden is a creature that is mostly a fly with a “funny white head” (Langelaan 151), which we later learn is André’s. We also learn that the new hybrid version of André is devastated by the power of his invention and its implications for humanity, as well as tortured by his own metamorphosis and by a kind of monstrous animality that it precipitates in his own impression. Hélène’s revulsion is apparent too, and she writes in her letter to her brother-in-law, Francois (the narrator) and the police: “the horror was too much for me, too unexpected… I could not take my eyes off him, I could not even close them, and yet I knew that if I looked at the horror much longer, I would go on

11 I located “The Fly” initially on an online blog transcribed by a fan named Alan Cook, and later in an an- thology entitled The Mammoth Book of Body Horror edited by Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan. I reference these in the bibliography. 155 screaming for the rest of my life” (160). We learn that André implores Hélène to help him die using a machine in the family-owned factory that is beside his laboratory. Francois’s narration takes places in the aftermath of André’s passing, as he goes through the process of uncovering what actually happened between his brother and sister-in-law in the lead-up to the death. While the science is vague, the story has many markers of humanist/post-humanist metamorphosis, of trickery, of hybridity and also of death and rebirth. In the discussion below, I will advance my exploration into the areas of humanist and post-humanist themes and evidence of trickster, metamorphosis, concreteness and embodiment in Langelaan’s “The Fly.” The story begins with a first person account of the narrator Francois’s neurosis about being telephoned. In the text, this sets up the narrator as being one who requires an amount of rational agency, perhaps a humanist’s need for control over their environment. Francois’s fear of being somehow invaded by the ringing telephone foreshadows his embodied fear and hatred of the boundary-crossing fly itself: “…in spite of doors and walls, some unknown person is coming into the room and onto my desk to talk right into my very ear, confidentially — whether I like it or not” (129). They are simply talking to him, but by his account, talking right into his very ear, perhaps the way we might perceive an insect to enter our space uninvited, creating a sonic/other senso- ry disruption. In the following passage, Francois expands further on his effort to control his animal reaction to the ringing telephone:

I am outwardly calm, but I only get back to a more normal state when I recognise the voice at the other end and when I know what is wanted of me. This effort at dominating a purely animal reaction and fear had become so effective that when my sister-in-law called me at two in the morning, asking me to come over, but first to warn the police that she had just killed my brother, I quietly asked her how and why she had killed André. (129-130)

This passage is again important from the point of view of this broader thesis, which draws upon critical animal studies among other post-humanist ideas. Francois’s “effort at dominating a purely animal reaction” is quite a neat summary of the humanist project which I am problematising in this thesis. It is also a distillation of one of the major themes of all of the stories I am looking at in this thesis, and acts as a further foreshadowing of the human/animal struggle which is to come.

156 Here also, as in the previous sections where I traverse sonic territories and the way that thresholds within them are zones of the trickster, I am arguing that the first site for embodied trickery in the short story, “The Fly” happens through a boundary crossing, the breaching of a sonic threshold, and through it, we are introduced calmly and rationally by the narrator to the main conflict of the story: the murder of the scientist, André. It is important to note however, that Francois’s calm and rational explanation is something of an illusion, and that the reader is somewhat in on the trick here; we can sense that he could be an infirm or unreliable narrator. It seems a trickster is lurking in the text from its very outset, winking at us. In further terms of positioning certain characters as significantly human, and as humanist, Langelaan has Francois describe André later in the following way:

He was human, had a keen sense of humour, loved children and animals and could not bear to see anyone suffer. I had often seen him drop his work to watch a parade of the local fire brigade, or see the Tour de France cyclists go by, or even follow a circus parade all around the village. He liked games of logic and precision, such as billiards and tennis, bridge and chess. (139)

Here there are allusions to André as a Renaissance man, a polymath, and as a man of feeling and intellect. He could not be more humanist! Exploring further these tensions around the human and the post-human in the text, there is a locus in the story where Langelaan seems to take a flight into the latter subjectivity, and perhaps too into the pre-human. It occurs in the interaction between Francois and his nephew and the shifting boundaries of self and other:

“Tell me, Uncle, do flies live a long time?” We were just finishing our lunch and, following an established tradition between us, I was just pouring some wine into Henri’s glass for him to dip a biscuit in. Had Henri not been staring at his glass gradually being filled to the brim, something in my look might have frightened him. This was the first time that he had ever mentioned flies, and I shuddered at the thought that Commissaire Charas might quite easily have been present. I could imagine the glint in his eye as he would have answered my nephew’s question with another question. I could almost hear him saying: 157 “I don’t know, Henri. Why do you ask?” “Because I have again seen the fly that Maman was looking for.” And it was only after drinking off Henri’s own glass of wine that I realised that he had answered my spoken thought. (Langelaan 136)

The communication between Francois and his nephew Henri in this instance is an example of post-human fluidity; of telepathy and tricky play at the boundaries of self and other. The post- human subject is, as Hayles says, “an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informatics entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction” (3). Clarke affirms this, with the notion that “stories of bodily metamorphoses depict in various figures the restless transformations of the human. They allude to the fact that the essence of the human is to have no essence” (170). This brings me to now exploring the figure of the trickster more directly, as a fluid creature who is responsible for a creative flow of energy which stories such as Langelaan’s “The Fly” depend on. Francois tells of how his sister-in-law, Hélène, in the aftermath of her husband’s death is in- terned in an asylum and “her favourite pastime seemed to be catching flies, which she invariably released unharmed after having examined them carefully” (134). In response to the character Com- missaire Charas’s investigatory comments about Hélène’s strange habit, Francois, perhaps in wilful denial, says that he does not agree that there is anything interesting about it. “Don’t you think that flies just happen to be the border-subject of her tendency to raving?” (135), he asks Commissaire Charas. Langelaan’s use of “border-subject” is a term in the text that I have found ambiguous, and indeed tricky. It provokes questioning around Langelaan's bilingualism and of his hybrid identity (French-British), and whether this has influenced his choice of words. Perhaps like Kafka, a Ger- man speaking Jew who grew up in Prague (formerly the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and today part of the Czech Republic), Langelaan could also be seen as what Deleuze and Guattari call a minor (16) or revolutionary writer. (17) I have referred earlier in this dissertation, in the literature review, to Kafka being “a sort of stranger within his own language” (26). While linking biography to a text is always somewhat speculative, this discussion does provoke questioning about whether Langelaan’s history as a spy for the Allies in the Second World War, which resulted in him having several surgical operations to alter his facial features, lent impetus to his exploration of metamorphosis and border subjects (Clarke 169). Further developing this line of inquiry, according to Jaishree Odin, “at the borders where the dominant culture meets minority cultures, the border subject emerges out of the perpetual encounter 158 of the dominant regulatory norms and the minority experience.” Similarly, Julia Schulze Wessel de- fines as “border subjects” those who end up in liberal democratic countries after having made long journeys along unpatrolled routes, as well as those who live in the territories of democratic, law- governed states without the legal right of residency. She makes the distinction between border subjects and refugees for the sake of conceptualising “the special political characteristics” (2) of today’s undocumented migrants. Indeed, we may think of the fly in its hybrid, insider/outsider form intertwined with the disintegrated and reintegrated André as a border subject or trickster in the story, and notice larger themes too which play out in the context of late liberal/late capitalist society. I am informed here too by Timothy Morton’s object oriented ontological call, as part of the non-human turn, to de-anthropomorphise the lineage of antiracism because “race, environment, nonhuman things are intertwined” (175). This fortifies this project as in part, an attempted monkey- wrench to the logic of late liberalism, in the context of the Anthropocene and the sixth extinction event. Another tricky border moment in Langelaan’s “The Fly” is when Francois is struggling with making sense of his brother’s death. He considers, but straight away refutes, the notion that he might have put his head under the industrial hammer as part of a bet:

He hated betting and had no patience with those who indulged in it. When- ever he heard a bet proposed, he would invariably remind all present, that, after all, a bet was but a contract between a fool and a swindler, even if it turned out to be a toss-up as to which was which. (7)

A trickster figure dances through this part of the story in several ways. Firstly, it turns out that André is a betting man despite his conscious and outward dogma/logic, as he places a bet on his own scientific invention, perhaps without considering that in this instance to be “swindled” might result in his being made hybrid with other animal species. Secondly, in the character’s own language — fool and swindler — the trickster once again reveals itself (Kostera 172). André’s disowned shadow traits are ironically what bring about his own demise. In this sense too, the story can be read as something of a proto-post-humanist parable, perhaps a warning about hubristic and im- prudent technological advancement. This, of course, is reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s Promethean Frankenstein, an even earlier proto-post-humanist parable on nature/culture hybridity meeting scientific hubris. Still on the topic of disowned traits, traces of Other-ness and tricky feelings that cannot be rationalised away, like with his neurosis about being telephoned, the character Francois again re- 159 veals himself through this passage: “another reason also made me hesitate, a vague sort of fear that he would look for and find the fly Henri had talked of. And that annoyed me a good deal because I could find no satisfactory explanation for the particular fear” (138-139). As I have expressed earlier in the exegesis, I am wary of the universalist, master narratives that Carl Jung proffers, yet it can be useful to apply his concepts more locally and I do so here: Jung’s statement on the trickster as “a (collective) shadow figure, a summation of all the inferior traits of character in individuals” (270) is applicable to Francois and his vague fear. I argue that a trickster can be traced in Francois’s inability to locate an explanation; rationality trickily evades him. Further in regard to trickery, Hélène’s confessionary letter relates a conversation with André, where the latter explains to her the principles behind his startling new invention. He compares these with the phenomena of flying stones in India which “come flying in as though thrown from outside…in spite of closed doors and windows” (145). Hélène’s response is to remind André of his professor friend’s comment “that if there was no trickery about it, the only possible explanation was that the stones had been disintegrated after having been thrown from outside, come through the walls, and then been reintegrated before hitting the floor or the opposite walls” (145). It is interesting here to note the professor’s distinction between the rationally explainable and trickery, even if such phenomena as stones disintegrating and reintegrating are not particularly explainable outside of the world Langelaan has built in “The Fly,” still sixty years after its writing. Here, trickery is implied to be an ignoble disruption, and scientific explanation something comparatively rational and by implication, honest. I have included this section in order to highlight how within the logic of the story’s protagonists, trickery becomes a vehicle of opposition or friction, with which to confirm the deification of science, even if ironically, it is scientific process which proves to be the biggest trickster of all, in hybridising André and his animal subjects. Later, when we learn that André has subjected the family companion animal, Dandelo, to the experiment, he tells Hélène of the procedure’s failure: “nothing…there is just no more Dandelo; only the dispersed atoms of a cat wandering, God knows where, in the universe” (146). Here André seems to have no proper scientific explanation at all for Dandelo’s disappearance and invokes (likely) the Judeo-Christian deity as the being who “knows.” Given that the professor places in binary opposition the projects of explanation and trickery, I ask if in this story “God” is implicitly the trickster, and note the slipperiness, or trickiness, of meaning in the text. In the 1958 film, The Fly an exchange between Hélène and André about his experimentation on their cat Dandelo reveals some of this trickiness:

160 HÉLÈNE: Where has she gone? ANDRÉ: into space…a stream of cat atoms…it’d be funny if life weren’t so sacred. (“The Fly” 00:46:18-28)

Here, we have the intertwining of the sacred and profane, the animal body a crossroads site for the binding of André’s tricky irony. The final example I will present here of trickery in Langelann’s short story is Hélène’s in- ternment to an asylum when in fact she is not at all mentally ill. She says:

Don’t you understand that if I am here, it is merely so that Henri won’t be the son of a woman who was guillotined for having murdered his father? Don’t you understand that I would by far prefer the guillotine to the living death of this lunatic asylum? (142)

Even though her partner has been disintegrated and then reintegrated as a hybrid species whom she subsequently helped euthanise, Helene maintains a level of mental coldness, clarity and an ability to trick. Here I am reminded of the Roman trickster hybrid goddess, Fraus, who has a woman’s face and the body of a snake and is the personification of treachery and fraud (Coultier). However, whether Hélène truly qualifies totally as trickster here may be questionable, as her agenda is not solely to trick for the sake of it, or for the sake of creating chaos; it is more for the protection of her son. What is reminiscent to me of trickery on Hélène’s part is that her resistance is within her own being, and thus very embodied, as her interment, despite her sanity, requires that she not leave the asylum. Here I am also reminded of Biblical woman tricksters: Lot’s daughters and in particular Tamar, who, as expressed by Chan, was “the husband killer” (94) in Genesis 38.6-30. While according to Chan, “Tamar is a trickster because she resorts to using her body in order to gain a place in Judah’s family,” she was also “pitiable” (100). Hélène has tricked the world that she is insane to protect her son, rather than accepting the charge of a cold-blooded murder she would likely be in- dicted for. Her real motives for helping André to die were due partly to her compassion for him and partly to her revulsion to his hybrid form. Here at every stage, there is tricky paradox, from her motives to her stratagem. Perhaps too, even her final act, suicide, is her ultimate trick, as with this she manages to slip from the bondage of both madness (or the need to feign it) and prison. In the 1986 cinema version of “The Fly,” hybrid insect trickster character Brundle/Fly’s suicide can be read in terms of it being his final amoral trick. 161 Moving now into discussion of concreteness and corporeality in the text, concepts which I have previously explored in Kafka’s Metamorphosis and in Butler’s Bloodchild, the first example revealing these in the short story “The Fly” occurs right at its outset. As discussed above, as part of Francois’s nervous introduction about his fear of being telephoned, we also hear of his brother’s death. Not long after this we learn through Hélène that the weapon was a factory steam hammer:

“André…André’s body, is down at the factory. They [the police] may want to go there first.” “Did you say that André is at the factory?” “Yes…under the steam-hammer.” (Langelaan 130)

Through this dialogue we are plunged very early on in the story into a horrific kind of corporeality. And again, if we consider the story parabolic about the perils of technology, the choice of a steam hammer as the murder/suicide weapon — albeit “it was originally a steam hammer, but everything is worked electrically here now” (2) — is a potent one when we consider that it was steam which powered the industrial revolution. What follows is quite a lengthy technical discussion/investigation between the Commissaire and Francois about the operation and settings of the hammer. This passage seems a digression; however, it actually raises issues of technology and corporeality. This correlates with Braidotti’s observation of taxonomies and the insect/technology association: “animals are used as prototypes for engineering, especially insects” (126). Further developing my reflections on the corporeal aspects of the text, I return now to the hybridity of André, the fly and Dandelo the cat, because it is through this scenario that I read the corporeal as having an almost libidinal quality, reminiscent of my explorations of desire exceeding representation in the previous sections on Metamorphosis and Bloodchild. This corporeal quality is clear in the following passage:

…pink and moist, the nose was also that of a cat, a huge cat. But the eyes! Or rather, where the eyes should have been were two brown bumps the size of saucers. Instead of a mouth, animal or human, was a long hairy vertical slit from which hung a black quivering trunk that widened at the end, trum- pet-like, and from which saliva kept dripping. (160)

162 Even though on the surface this description seems to be almost ghastly, to me there is also corporeal sensuality and desire expressed through the language used here. In the 1958 film version, which I will discuss further in a moment, the hybrid creature formerly known as André attempts to stroke an unconscious and recumbent Hélène with his insectoid claw, while the human hand attempts to stop it. This to me is also suggestive of a very embodied desire, which if it were occurring in real life, and not read in a text, I would argue would be beyond representation. By this I mean that it is a bodily act which is more than linguistic; it is an act of desire. As mentioned previously, I do not wish to romanticise the body, and especially I do not condone what is in this instance a bodily imposition without consent, but rather to suggest that what occurs is an act of desire (albeit not without tenderness) on the part of the hybridised André character and therefore transgressive of the humanist intellect. However, because I only know of the gesture through the text, it presents a tricky paradox. It is a representation of an embodied desire which I would argue is beyond representation, but which carries traces of its corporeality. I have theorised this paradox more closely in the literature review in my reading of the work Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (106). In Langelaan’s short story insect trickery and metamorphoses play out in a number forms; in some places very obviously, in others, as traces or gestures. However, this initial text, despite it being the foundational gem upon which a great metamorphic insectoid legacy has been built, is not as useful for my project as the film adaptations, particularly when compared with David Cronenberg's 1986 version, which, for the purposes of this thesis, is the more vivid and rich rendition. The 1958 version directed by Neumann, while somewhat anaemic compared to Cronenberg’s version, still explores trickster insect metamorphosis, desire and corporeality, and also serves as a useful contrast, especially in its tendency to binarise that which is (non)represented as more fluid, such as nature and culture, body and mind in the 1986 film version.

Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film The Fly

The 1958 film version of “The Fly” begins with a buzzing sound. The opening credits roll over a backdrop of a fly-wire with a hole in it, through which a fly is escaping. This is very literal, very corporeal; it is footage of an actual fly and is also the first instance of animal as boundary crosser, or trickster, in the text. The first actual scene after the opening credits begins with an ominous shot of the front of the factory — Delambre Freres Electronics Montreal Ltd — through Kafkaesque iron fence bars. A 163 clock chimes and an unseen feline yowls hungrily. The camera pans down to show us a black cat jump through the fence, another animal crossing a boundary. It runs into the factory property, still yowling. A uniformed guard, backlit, receives the trickster cat at the door of the building, cooing, “Ah, Satan, mon cher. You are late ce soir. Still looking for your girlfriend, huh?” (The Fly, 00:01:57-00:02:06). He picks up the cat, whose tails thrashes against his grip. He puts it down again and says, “Mam’zelle Tante Lou has found another. You will never see her again. But don't you worry… there will be others” (“The Fly”, 00:02:07-13)Despite the cat’s resistance to his affections, and the excessively imposing way in which the guard is anthropomorphising it, there is still a tender embodied playfulness and sensuousness to his demeanour. Later, when Francois and Inspector Charas enter André’s studio,12 again there is the sound of a fly buzzing in the background. They are met with a chaotic scene, of broken objects and general mess. Francois exclaims, “This is the work of a madman! There was over $200,000 worth of special equipment here!” (The Fly 00:14:57-58). This reveals a first trace of André the trickster as destroyer, a paradox which I explored in greater depth in the literature review and which is understood by trickster scholar Radin who says: “trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer” (155). Subsequently, when Inspector Charas tries to find out from Francois what his brother has been working on, this dialogue ensues:

FRANCOIS: The Air Ministry scientists have been through all of his papers — everything. They didn’t mean a thing to them. INSPECTOR CHARAS: We couldn’t decipher the ashes. Nothing there either. (“The Fly” 00:21:17-25)

This escape from detection is another example of André the trickster-destroyer at work. Further, “they didn’t mean a thing to them” is interesting to me from the point of view of Gumbrecht’s troubled sense of meaning in the humanities (52). It seems to point to the (non)representational abyss that André becomes both lost and found in, caught between human and animal. As well as trickster as destroyer there are also traces of André as trickster creator and mage in the 1958 film. Before demonstrating the new technology he has developed, he tells Hélène:

ANDRÉ: Hélène, you’re the first to see a miracle. (The Fly 00:29:57-59)

12 In the short story, the person investigating the death of André is referred to as Commissaire Charas, Charas or the Commissaire whereas in the film he is Inspector Charas. 164 Later, she questions him:

HÉLÈNE: Have you turned magician? ANDRÉ: In a way. (The Fly 00:32.25-27)

After his explanation about the technology and some further exchange, Hélène questions him again:

HÉLÈNE: You actually did this? It’s no trick?” ANDRÉ: “No. I can transport matter. Anything.” (The Fly 00:33.39-46)

It is interesting that André draws quite an arbitrary line between the “miracle” of his work and trickery, much like the example of the flying stones in the short story “The Fly,” which I referred to above, where a professor makes a distinction between the explainable and trickery. I ask if this is meta-trickery at work and am reminded of Baudelaire in the poem “The Generous Gambler,” “la plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas/the loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist” made famous by the film The Usual Suspects (Singer). I also refer to the literary adage in my own manuscript, Order of Our Lady Cicada. Ap- propriately, Hyde answers the question of where tricksters may be found in the modern world, with “they’re found where they always were; they aren’t found at all” (11). The implications of this are wide and complex, too much so for the boundaries of this topic, but put simply, tricksters defy signification; they do not wear signs on their heads telling us what they are. Their very nature is that they present immanently, and most often as something else entirely. Further on tricksters and trickery in Neumann’s The Fly, Francois fools the nurse into letting him see Hélène, pretending his visit has been sanctioned by the Inspector. He then tricks Hélène by pretending to have the fly (the little metamorphosed version of André, a fly with a white head) that she has been looking for, locked in his desk. Following this, he threatens Hélène, saying that he will give the fly to Charas, thus betraying André’s dying request for all evidence of his work to be destroyed. Francois’s allegiance is neither to authority nor to any one individual (neither his sister-in- law nor his nephew, perhaps not even to his late brother), nor to truth or lies, but rather to their confluence, to, as Hyde puts it, “trickster’s limbo, where boundary markers shift at night, shoes have no heel and toe, inky clouds attack transparency, every resting place turns into a crossroads” (80). Per- haps it is no accident too that the unnervingly tricky Vincent Price was cast in the role of Francois 165 and that “there is a common misconception, shared by whoever wrote the notes for the old VHS videocassette release, that Vincent Price played the role of the unfortunate scientist,” according to reviewer, Steve Biodrowski. Indeed, I question if Francois is the ultimate trickster of the story, as the narrator and deliverer of the story, and it is interesting to think about how much static he places on the line (Hyde 16), similarly perhaps to T’Gatoi in her role as advocate and go-between in But- ler’s Bloodchild. Having explored some traces of tricksters in the 1958 film, I will now look to the exploration of (non)representation in the text: moments and themes which suggest a corporeality or sense of that which is beyond representation. One such moment is when André and Hélène are at a ballet performance, before André’s insectoid metamorphosis occurs. Hélène seems immersed in the show, but André is scrawling what appear to be equations on the ballet programme. Here the representational comes into friction with the non-representational, if we consider dance to be the most truly corporeal art form and an equa- tion being perhaps as disembodied, abstract and representational as an expression can be.13 Even if ballet itself often tells stories, here in this film’s world it is not obvious to the layperson what narrative the performance is representing. After Hélène (nonverbally) expresses her dismay at André’s behaviour, they smile at one another and embrace, watching the final moments of the performance together. Whilst this is an intimate physical moment between them, André’s slightly tense facial expression suggests that his mind is still elsewhere: on his equations and on his teleportation technology. The final twirls of ballet tutus fade and blend into the following scene, wherein Hélène’s own skirt twirls as she crosses the threshold into André’s laboratory. I would argue that these twirls can be read as expressions of the non-representational, and reveal energy or movement rather than a point of symbolism or narrative. Following this, there is a scene which is charged with sexual or sensual frisson between Hélène and André. Hélène has entered the room humming, while André closes the door behind her and turns on the light. They stand apart from one another in mutual admiration for a moment, not speaking. After a few flirtatious words spoken which hint at their plans for the culmination of the evening in lovemaking, they embrace and prepare to drink some “reintegrated champagne.” Hélène’s corporeal expressions are sensual, to which André responds verbally:

ANDRÉ: You’re in an unscientific mood.

13According to Brandstetter, “the phantasm of dance gives form to the expressive moment, in which all signs are extinguished” (235). 166 HÉLÈNE: You…don’t approve? ANDRÉ: I didn’t say that. (The Fly 00:42:57-00:43:02)

After this exchange, he puts the champagne through the disintegration/reintegration process; and it seems to be that through his scientific/metamorphic process he is able to enact his corporeal seduction of Hélène. Once again, we have a crossroads/paradoxical moment, and I am interested in how André locates his embodiment and perhaps his libido, through his metamorphic scientific praxis/profession. It seems a contradictorily tricky foreshadowing to the 1980s version of the text, where the scientist character, Brundle/Fly, played by Jeff Goldblum, is similarly libidinally intertwined with his scientific work. In tracing (non)representations in the 1958 film, I return to the matter of Hélène’s intern- ment and her obsession with catching the fly. Francois, not realising that the fly is in fact his brother in a hybrid insectoid form, remarks to Inspector Charms, “it’s just a common housefly” (The Fly 00:21:36). To which Charas’s reply is Freudian: “Perhaps it’s symbolic of something deep in her (Hélène’s) subconscious, as the psychiatrist believes?” (The Fly 00:19:40-44) My response to this is, on the contrary, it is not at all symbolic. Rather, it is non-representational. It is her husband, morphed with a fly. This is a deeply anti-Oedipal/corporeal moment in the text. It is possible to read this as an allusion by the screenwriter to Kafka, to Gregor’s transformation; his becoming-insect and the way this text through its concreteness also defies representation. Further on that which is beyond representation in the film, during the investigation of An- dré’s death, Inspector Charas asks Francois if his brother ever experimented with animals. This is the exchange that follows:

FRANCOIS: Never! CHARAS: Or insects? FRANCOIS: Insects? No. That would be funny if… No! Hélène and André believed in the sacredness of life. They wouldn’t harm anything…not even a fly. (The Fly 00:16:40-58)

Here there are two points of significance to my investigation. First is Francois’s reference to the sacred, and how his misapprehension of his brother’s work connotes that there are two imbricated levels to the story, depending on whose perspective we see it from: André’s project unfolds not only on the plane of the sacred but also on the plane of the profane, the crossroads of which is very 167 much the terrain of the trickster. Second, is Francois’s reference to the cliché, “they wouldn’t harm anything…not even a fly.” As I pointed out in the previous paragraph, where Charas suggests that the fly is representative of something in Hélène’s subconscious, again the fly here is marked as a symbol, this time as perhaps of the lowest form of life. The notion that André would not even harm a fly was initially taken as given; in fact, a fly is actually experimented with and quite likely harmed down to its very DNA, and the fusion of human and fly has created a trickster creature of both the lowest and highest standing at once, in the implied hierarchy of the world built inside the film. Aris- totle’s “natural order” also places insects at the fundament of the telos; “an ascending hierarchy of perfection” (Raffles 130). Following on from my earlier point concerning André-as-scientist locating his libidinal self through his scientific/metamorphic praxis, another exemplar of this type of embodied trickster paradox is a scenario which does not occur in the short story “The Fly,” but does in the 1958 film version. André-as-fly consists of a human body with the head, left arm and left hand of a fly. Other parts of him are also potentially made up of the fly’s body, but if they exist, are concealed by his clothing. After Hélène first catches sight of the new André-as-fly, she screams and backs away from him. He walks towards her exuding an animalistic kind of violence, taking his twitching fly claw from his pocket and extending it in her direction. She continues to scream, then faints from distress. When she hits the floor, André-as-scientist seems to switch back into dominance, as his physicality demonstrates through a more pensive stance. He bends down to Hélène, reaching out to her with his human arm, and lifts her over to a chaise lounge whereon he places her, limp and unconscious. He strokes her hair and face gently with his human (right) hand, his wedding ring in view, but the stroking becomes increasingly lascivious, and he leans in uncomfortably close with his big fly face. Meanwhile, his fly claw begins to creep up and to grip her head. He uses his human hand to pull away the fly claw and there then appears to be a humanist fight between his two selves; the human side, which attempts a rational kind of civility, and the animal predatory self which attempts to take advantage of Hélène while she is unconscious. A similar sort of struggle takes place again later in the film when André takes a piece of chalk in his shaking right “human” hand and writes some undecipherable words on a blackboard as well as, “help me but don’t come near me,” underlining “but don’t come near me,”;then the word, “kill fly please” on the black board. Following this, his fly claw (left hand) strikes out chaotically, slamming into some machinery. He attempts to jam this fly claw into his coat pocket. He then scrawls in capital letters on the black board with his right hand “LOVE YOU,” while Hélène looks on stricken. 168 This struggle between man and fly, civilised and beast, is significant for this project because of how embodied it is in the film. Desire as an expression, which, according to Deleuze, is beyond representation, drives André's struggle in the film. Also, the struggle here between animal and human could be seen through a paradoxical trickster lens, in that André in his new hybrid form embodies both; but, as I will explore later when discussing Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), the earlier version’s hybridity is not as post-human in its exploration of metamorphosis; it is not as subject to flows. Rather, it is more binary, always splitting and switching between states of being. Indeed, the earlier versions of the story are not as productive for my purposes in this project as the later film adaptation. The final example in the 1958 film where an embodied trickster paradox occurs is when An- dré lies on the bed of the industrial steam hammer, hoping for Hélène to activate it and thus destroy him. Here there is another struggle between selves: between Eros and Thanatos. The human, transcendent, representational (right-handed) part of himself is anti-life — it wants to die, now that he realises he no longer has any control over himself; but the becoming-animal, immanent, non-representational (left-handed) side of himself wants to live.

David Cronenberg’s 1986 film The Fly

I will now discuss the 1986 film, The Fly, and will address in my discussion the topics which I have in previous sections: traces of trickster insects and metamorphoses in this text, and the exploration of that which is beyond representation, expressed through intimations of desire and/or the corporeal. Firstly, I will outline some of the ways in which the 1986 film version departs significantly from the original short story and the 1958 film, using these differences as loci to explore the topic of the thesis. Kellner identifies two of the glaring differences between the two texts:

While the original Fly (1958) safely anchored the scientist’s experiments within the bosom of the family — and centred on his devoted wife — Cro- nenberg’s Fly takes place in the post-familial singles scene. And while the original took place in a Montreal suburban home and garden that looked like a Disneyesque small-town U.S.A., Cronenberg’s film takes place in an urban loft filled with junk-food, computers, and other detritus of ultra modernity (98). 169 I read this as Cronenberg tricking the nuclear humanist “wholesomeness” of the former versions and regurgitating the story (similar to the way the protagonist Brundle/Fly regurgitates his sugary snacks) as a comparatively more dystopian vision than its predecessors. One which I would read as encoding characteristics of a post-human philosophical approach to art/knowledge construction. In the earlier works, the scientist’s experimentations with matter resulted in dark becomings, disturbingly post-human in an otherwise humanist seeming setting — the white middle class, post- war triumph of the Enlightenment — whereas in the world that Cronenberg builds, post-humanist traces seem to permeate both the story and its setting. I would imagine that by “other detritus of ultra modernity,” Kellner refers to the home video camera, cordless telephones, shoulder pads and skinny neck-ties in the film; yet I would consider this rather more as detritus of post-modernity/ post-humanism, despite director Cronenberg’s self-identification with modernism (Beard ix). While there are many other differences between the old and newer versions, the basic premise of the 1986 film is the same as its predecessors: a scientist accidentally fuses himself with a fly through his self-experimentation. Unlike in the short story however, the scientist Seth Brundle (later “Brundle/Fly”) does not only genetically splice a cat into his hybrid self. Near the 1986 film’s ending, Brundle/Fly is teleported along with part of the door frame of the teleportation pod itself, fusing him and the door frame together, pushing hybridity to extremes. I read this as both satirical and self-conscious, tricking the preceding animal/human binary narratives by creating a third non- human/object site for hybridity. I would also argue that this scene illustrates a sense of ruthless amorality that is latent in the capabilities of the science, and therefore I ask if this makes the science itself the ultimate trickster in this version of the story. In terms of differences between the original texts and the 1986 version, there is the subplot of Seth Brundle’s (later, Brundle/Fly’s) relationship with journalist Veronica Quaife (Ronnie). In- deed, as referred to above, their relationship takes place outside of the comparatively heteronorma- tive 1950s vision of marriage in the earlier texts, occurring mostly in Brundle’s grungy warehouse which trickily doubles as his laboratory. Also, there is something of a love triangle in the story, as Ronnie seems to be in a liminal relational (both erotic and romantic) zone with her previous lover and employer, Stathis Borins. Borins, in a mode of transgressive border-crossing trickery, lets himself, uninvited, into her home and later into the warehouse, helping to rescue her from Brundle-Fly, even though throughout, it is very clear that Ronnie is an empowered, strong and desirous woman, an agent of her own destiny.

170 Expressions which are subtler, and more implied, about the scientists’ desire and libido in the earlier versions (or perhaps just more restrained by the conservatism of the era), are emphasised and extended in the 1986 version. In a sense, scientist-as-trickster in the later version is most present when expressed through sexuality. Kellner highlights this degree of intense sexuality, an argument with which I largely concur:

Brundle/Fly is in touch with his body to an unparalleled degree, he discov- ers new physical and sexual energies, and he is aware that he is the bearer of a new species being. Yet he is unable to synthesise the new and the old, and eventually destroys himself. At one point, Brundle/Fly complains: “I'm saying I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over and the insect is awake.” (99)

Indeed, I would agree that Brundle/Fly’s embodied sexuality is deepened by his metamorphosis; he has several seemingly tireless sexual sessions after fusing with the fly and tries to convince one of his lovers to “go through” the teleportation device in order to “feel sexy,” although at this stage this is without him being consciously aware that he has been fused with a fly in the teleportation process. On the other hand, André in the 1958 film locates his libido through the process of scientific experimentation itself, not so much his metamorphosis, which we see in the interaction between him and Hélène in the laboratory after their evening at the ballet (as I refer to earlier in the chapter in the section on the 1958 film version). This sensual connection between the pair occurs before André has passed through the device, and seems more inspired by the combination of their night out at the ballet and his recent scientific successes with the teleportation device. Once he has transformed, there is also an animalistic sexuality which expresses itself through his hybrid form. However, in this earlier film work, he is constantly battling to restrain it and he has already discard- ed his identity as a scientist, given the horrors he has catalysed in the name of science. This is quite different to Brundle/Fly’s more embodied and deeply hybridised metamorphosis. Further, prior to Seth’s “becoming,” he is introverted and shy, his flirtation with Ronnie taking place over several tentative encounters. While, like his predecessor, André, he seems to locate self-confidence through his scientific developments, I would argue that he also displays more the aspects of the “naïf trickster” at the beginning of the film, following Cresap’s exploration of Andy Warhol as an embodiment of this nuanced archetype. Cresap argues of Warhol: “it was hard to dis-

171 cern the motive behind the act, hard to separate the person from the persona, hard to know where the naïf left off and the trickster took over” (3). Later in the Cronenberg film, once the metamorphosis is fully underway, a comparatively phallic trickster takes over. However, Cresap’s thinking is still helpful here, as far as theorising Seth’s initial “cultivated naivety” (26); I have found it useful to this discussion particularly in understanding his desire to transform. I argue too that Cresap’s naïf trickster is also reminiscent of the puer aeternus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses — Iacchus,14 an archetype later identified by Carl Jung, and one which has been linked with tricksters at different times through different stories, particularly, according to Gormley, in the western medieval mind in figures such as Parzival and Merlin (198). Indeed, the earlier iteration of Seth, before he fuses with the fly, displays puer aeternus/naïf trickster traits. Similarly, in my own creative work as part of this thesis on insectoid metamorphosis and tricksters-beyond-representation, the protagonist, Magda, is referred to as “puella aeternus” by her housemate. Magda is a somewhat composite figure, who is psychologically rootless; who, like both puer/puella aeternus and many tricksters, according to Gormley, “embody both woundedness and suffering, and thus they have the ability to remove suffering and heal woundedness in people” (198). Magda’s ability remains fairly latent and ambiguous in Order of Our Lady Cicada, except for at the very end when she takes Tomas to experience the initiation that she has experienced with the hope of helping him transform his woundedness. One further instance of Seth playing out the puer/naïf trickster (before becoming the Brun- dle/Fly trickster) is when he tries to impress Ronnie with talk of his espresso machine.

SETH: You could come back to my lab. Listen, I’ll make you cappuccino. I have a Faema of my very own. You know what that is? It’s not the dilet-

14 According to Marie-Louise von Franz in her text, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus,

“Puer aeternus is the name of a god of antiquity. The words themselves come from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and are there applied to the child-god in the Eleusinian mysteries. Ovid speaks of the child-god Iacchus, addressing him as puer aeternus and praising him in his role in these mysteries. In later times, the child-god was identified with Dionysus and the god Eros. He is the divine youth who is born in the night in this typical mother-cult mystery of Eleusis and who is a kind of re- deemer. He is a god of vegetation and resurrection, the god of divine youth, corre- sponding to such oriental gods as Tammuz, Attis and Adonis. The title puer aeternus therefore means eternal youth, but we also use it sometimes to indicate a certain type of young man who has an outstanding mother complex.” (7) 172 tante’s plastic kitchen model. It’s one of those, ah... ah…ah, real restaurant espresso machines with a-an eagle on top and… RONNIE: Somehow I get the feeling you don’t get out much. SETH: You can tell that? RONNIE: Yeah. (The Fly 00:02:30-47)

Later, perhaps out of a sense of shame or anger at his own naiveté, when Ronnie leaves him suddenly in the night to see her ex-partner Stathis, Seth Brundle attempts to self-medicate with alcohol, seeming to try to actively shed the naïf aspect of trickster. This is when, drunk, he enters the teleportation machine along with a housefly (unbeknownst to him), only to become fused with the insect interloper. Before he realises what has happened, the new hybrid, now Brundle/Fly, is extremely empowered by the fusion. He believes the process of disintegration and reintegration has refined him:

SETH: I hardly need to sleep anymore and I feel wonderful. It’s like a drug,

but a perfectly pure and benign drug. The power I feel surging inside me! (The Fly 00:47:29-34)

And later, he emphasises,

SETH: Human teleportation, molecular decimation, breakdown and reformation is inherently purging. It makes a man a King. From the moment I walked out of the pod I felt like a million bucks. (The Fly 00:44:59-45:08)

Here is the ultimate metamorphic moment of the film, and also the ultimate moment of naïf trickery, as Brundle/Fly is still unaware of the fly component to his being. The naïf component of the composite character of Brundle is who drives him to transform — that is, to progress from his sexual naiveté to a more embodied persona — and it lingers even in his new form for a significant portion of the film, wherein in his naiveté he does not even realise he is now part fly. After his “molecular decimation, breakdown and reformation,” and before they realise the error in his process, Brundle/Fly and Ronnie engage in very energised sexual encounters, his body/ mind seemingly electrified by his new prowess and potential. Later too, as further demonstration of his new becoming-insect trickster sexuality, he also meets a woman, Tawny, in a bar. After carrying 173 her up multiple flights of steps, the same stairs which when he was only human he struggled to climb, he then engages in an all-night sexual encounter with her. So, in this sense, Kellner’s point, referenced earlier, that Brundle/Fly is “in touch with his body to an unparalleled degree, he discov- ers new physical and sexual energies” (99), is well observed. His transformation means he is no longer desexualised by the anti-life qualities of his own humanistic mind or consciousness itself. This is also relevant to my earlier discussions of embodied desire and the points I have made in the sections on Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Butler’s Bloodchild, about desire as a force which is beyond representation. I suggest that the text is (non)representing a transformation that is not ideational or existent in the realm of language, spectacle or thought. It is not due to a transcendent experience of god, nor to a commodity, such as in a nerdy teen girl makeover movie, rather something far more ineffable, beyond both organised religion and capitalism. It demonstrates encounter with one’s animal self, a hybrid apotheosis, which has been marginalised and abstracted by liberal humanism. Likewise, I hold that there is something in the presence and energy of Goldblum’s performance here which exceeds representation. It is almost as if Goldblum in the role of Seth even prior to his metamorphosis, embodies hybridity. Indeed, “bug-eyes and gangly limbs lend him a distinctly insectoid look from the start” (Smith). Of course, this is still expressed here as representation, using bodily signs; however I am attempting to understand this less through the spectacle, and consider it more as something embodied by the actor that I experience corporeally, through spectatorship of the text — and here spectatorship is a reductive term. Trickily/paradoxically, I am attempting to use representation as a tool to locate that which is beyond it. I am not claiming to know that Goldblum is experiencing anything — all I have and can refer to is the transfer of energy. Goldblum’s pre-metamorphosis insectoid performance is different from the performance of David Hedison, who plays André the scientist in the 1958 version. Hedi- son’s performance, in comparison to Goldblum’s and as dictated by the script, is far more binary; when he is André the scientist, he embodies the transcendent light of the Enlightenment, with some moments of shadow presentation through his invocation of “God” as an explanation for the disappearance of his cat. When he becomes André/Fly, we see a more modernist binary battle between controlled transcendent rationality and inordinate immanent wildness. This performance is therefore comparatively more representational and less embodied than Goldblum’s. In this sense, I support the first part of Kellner’s point above about Brundle/Fly being in touch with his body (99). Yet I find his conjunctive point problematic: that Brundle-Fly “is unable to synthesise the new and the old, and eventually destroys himself” (99). This reading is mired in 174 reductionist dialectical thinking in its implication that synthesis is Brundle/Fly’s (failed) telos. I would argue that Brundle/Fly is always already becoming-fly and he has not failed in his process of hybridity. Of course, his insectoid dream of being a man and his eventual demise holds traces of humanist poetry and pathos. But I would argue, as I have in the previous sections, that in this context, (self) destruction can also be read as an act of a post-human trickster; it is a taboo form of metamorphosis. Kushner articulates:

…heroism shares with suicide a fantasy of remembrance. In both we uncover a wish to transcend death. The most heroic act that one can imagine of course is to sacrifice one’s life for social good — an act that Durkheim labelled “altruistic suicide.” (143)

While Durkheim’s framing of terminal self-sacrifice as a heroic act is not something I am advocating, I am exploring the possibility that Brundle/Fly might see his fate in these terms. At the end of the film, when he is a festering fusion of human, fly and door, he “begs fo death” (Kirkman), which Ronnie grants him. It is difficult to know whether this was indeed “altruistic suicide,” or a wish by the hybrid creature for his/their own suffering to cease. It is ambiguous and never resolved in the text. It is also quite ambiguous as to whether Seth’s intentions with his experimentations from the outset were altruistic. When Ronnie drives him home after their first encounter with one another we learn that, “Brundle’s primary reason for building a teleporter is because he suffers from motion- sickness” (Kirkman).

SETH: When I was a kid, I, ah...puked on my tricycle. I hate vehicles. (The Fly 00:03:32-38)

Whether curing the problem of motion sickness is his real intention, or whether it is making his mark on society by revolutionising transportation, in any case the assertion I am making is that his death is not the result of a failure to synthesise two selves, as Kushner implies. If it is not “altruistic suicide” (Kushner 143), and instead the conclusion follows from his experimentation possibly being amoral and therefore only conducted for the sake of experimentation itself, this amorality then is another aspect of the trickster, and Brundle/Fly’s death could be his final amoral trick.

175 It is important to note that I carry out these post-dialectical explorations with awareness that Cronenberg “has a strong conception of himself as a modernist artist” (Beard ix). Indeed, Cronen- berg’s attraction to the “The Fly” was “partly because it so neatly reflected his own obsessions with our uneasy relationship with our bodies and their fleshy existence” (Smith). Although I read the film in a post-human sense, I will follow this trail for a moment, and say that possibly, Seth is so uneasy with his flesh as a mere mortal, revealed through the emotional vulnerability he experiences when in physical intimacy with Ronnie, that he feels compelled to disintegrate and reintegrate it. Then, as a hybrid creature, and after his initial manic hubris has worn off, Brundle/Fly later comes to realise his profound uneasiness with his new body, to the point of feeling diseased:

BRUNDLE/FLY: You were right. I’m diseased and, ah... it might be conta- gious somehow. I wouldn't want to infect you. And it’s been accelerating. It’s unrelenting. Every day it changes. Every time I look in the mirror, there’s someone different, someone hideous, repulsive. (The Fly 01:03:04-28)

Cronenberg’s modernist (with post-humanist interventions) frame here can be read as represented through the reference to disease as alienation, through Brundle/Fly seeing someone different every time he looks in the mirror. Returning now to differences between the earlier and later version of the story as sites for my close reading, in the 1986 film version the characters have all been renamed. This would be otherwise unremarkable, except that in the later version, the protagonist, Seth, shares his name with the ancient trickster “god of chaotic forces” (Hart 194) from the Egyptian pantheon. The Set being (or Seth in ancient Greek), according to Te Velde, was “the divine foreigner, he was the god of thunder and storm” (128) who was worshipped and later persecuted (141). Much like Seth Brundle/Fly, the trickster god Seth’s form was some kind of hybrid or “composite animal” (Hart 194). Whether or not naming his protagonist thus was a conscious representational decision on the part of David Cro- nenberg, who wrote the screenplay as well as directed it, this detail suggests a possible line of flight when read in the context of research into tricksters and concepts of hybridity, and using the lens of critical animal studies. It is particularly interesting that Seth Brundle/Fly and the god Seth, both embody the trickster down to their corporeal form, with its affront to the binary of human and animal. Perhaps, too, like the ancient Seth, who destroys the chaotic snake Apophis (Hodge), Seth Brundle/Fly momentarily takes control of chaos (nature), by transporting matter from place to 176 place. Also in the spirit of the deity Seth, is Seth Brundle/Fly’s will for destruction/transformation, a metamorphosis which he catalyses in a very definitive way at the very end of the film, with his own death, an issue I have addressed above. Another way that Cronenberg differentiates his film from its previous iterations is that in the original, the scientist fully becomes a fly hybrid the moment his experiment goes awry, whereas in Cronenberg’s 1986 version, the transformation is piecemeal. To me this plays out a different kind of metamorphosis, one which is more deeply corporeal; perhaps because it mirrors the actual temporality of insectoid metamorphoses which is also a gradual process. In this sense, I would argue that the 1986 version is less representational than the previous texts, as it occurs through flows, and is more viscerally gory and life-like, replete with bodily fluids and functions. Therefore the transformation is more concretely and immanently metamorphic, as distinct from the sudden sanitised change from human to post-human, in the previous texts. Also, I would argue that the transformation can be read as theoretically more post-structuralist and post-humanist in the 1986 film compared with the earlier texts, because of Brundle/Fly’s more deeply hybridised kind of becoming. In the previous texts the human/fly/cat being seems more to split and switch, in comparison with a more fluid Brundle/Fly (and later /door) hybrid. In the latter text it is less this or that, and more this and that, despite Cronenberg’s own stated modernist leanings. One of the significant differences between the earlier versions and the 1986 version is the striking presence of a poetic monologue by Brundle/Fly, which references a poem by Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism.” Here, Brundle/Fly is speaking to Ronnie after she refuses his urging to teleport herself:

BRUNDLE/FLY: You’re afraid to dive into the plasma pool, aren’t you? You’re afraid to be destroyed and recreated, aren’t you? I’ll bet you think that you woke me up about the flesh, don’t you? But you only know society’s straight line about the flesh. You can’t penetrate beyond society’s sick grey fear of the flesh! Drink deep or taste not the plasma spring! You see what I’m saying? I’m not just talking about sex and penetration, I’m talking about penetration beyond the veil of the flesh! A deep, penetrating dive into the plasma pool! (The Fly 00:48.14-46)

Here, Brundle/Fly is alluding to something which is beyond the Cartesian/humanist binary of the mind and body, of man and woman. Where in the original poem by Pope, the Pierian spring is 177 a sacred/transcendent, metaphorical source of knowledge and science, in Brundle/Fly’s version, the plasma spring is both immanent and sacred, both metaphorical and metamorphic. While his language is quite phallic (“penetrating”), the plasma spring he speaks of is, I would argue, beyond the binary of the penetrating phallus and the receptive womb; it is more dynamic and queer than this. It is a post-human spring, a fertile hermaphroditic zone for the hybridisation of body and mind. Another difference in the Cronenberg text, compared to the original/former versions, is the way in which Ronnie reveals her own traces of the trickster. Where her counterparts in the earlier works (named Hélène, in both) seem only able to be empowered by the tactic of feigning madness to avoid prosecution for murder, Ronnie, as an independent woman of the 1980s is a journalist and she is fortuitously, with her employer/former lover, a witness to the death of Brundle/Fly; she does not have to self-pathologise to avoid culpability. She, like Seth, also has access to technology which she trickily hides in her pocket, in order to record him, early on in the film. This is a record which later perhaps could have supported her case, if she was to stand trial for the murder/euthanising of Brundle/Fly. Reinforcing the significance of Ronnie as a trickster, earlier in the film, when Seth attempts to transport a baboon, the machine fails to reintegrate it properly, leaving it effectively inside-out. Seth laments that the machine cannot deal with the flesh and that this must be his fault, as though the machine is some kind of objectification of his own schizoid nature. Interviewing him on film, Ronnie probes him on this and he explains his view further: that computers only know what they are told, that his own lack of knowledge of the flesh is to blame and that he will need to learn more about it. Following this, her trickery becomes key to Seth’s transformation, as it is through the couple’s sexual relations — led by her in the beginning, and the way they embody Seth and transform his mind — that he is able to reprogram the technology to be effective in transporting flesh. In a tenderly erotic moment Ronnie says: “I’m sorry. I just want to eat you up. You know, that’s why old ladies pinch babies’ cheeks. It's the flesh. It just makes you crazy” (The Fly 00:23:40-50). I would argue that their relations are a kind of tricky tantric/sex magic imprinting for the insectoid “craziness” or hybrid trickery which ensues. A similar tricky point of difference between the representation of women in the earlier versions of “The Fly” compared with the latter iteration, is Ronnie’s seductive removal of her stocking as an artefact to place in the teleportation device in response to Seth’s nervous request for an item which belongs to her; an object which is “uniquely” her. Here again, she embodies a kind of seductive, desirous sense of agency, rolling a stocking and handing it to him. The Hélènes of the previous versions, while locating power over their destinies in their own ways, are never so erotically tricky. 178

In this chapter, I have attempted to trace (non)representations of insects, tricksters and metamorphoses in The Fly — the original short story and two films — in open flows rather than to fix them to closed systems of thought. Also in this chapter and in the one preceding it, I have focused on the power and beauty of immanent, concrete non-metaphoric writing from any era; writing which evades being pinned to singular meaning and transcendent narrativising. While I cannot say that I have managed to achieve this with my own work, I have certainly attempted it and I discuss this further in the following chapter, where I address my own novella, Order of Our Lady Cicada and in I Am The Woo, a phantom novella by me, as read by Magda Levy, the protagonist in Order of Our Lady Cicada.

179 Chapter 5: Two Bloods

Two Bloods I A discussion of the (non)representations of insect trickster metamorphosis in my novella Or- der of Our Lady Cicada and a close reading of I Am The Woo conducted by Magda Levy

Once Jacques Derrida asked us for a name: ‘We must invent (a name) for those “critical’’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.’ The name we would have given him was fictocriticism, but he went on anyway to write, and perform, critically, and sometimes fictionally, for instance by telling stories while making his philosophical arguments. One common effect of this was the collapsing of the ‘detached’ and all-knowing subject into the text, so that his (or your) performance as writer includes dealing with a problem all contemporary writers must face: how the hell did I get here? — Stephen Muecke

The first part of this chapter will look at (non)representations of insects, tricksters and metamorphoses in my novella Order of Our Lady Cicada, with a discussion on the novella itself as a trickster/minor form. Included in this discussion will be an attempt to answer the question: how did I get here? The second part of the chapter will be a ficto-critical work written by the protagonist in my novella, Magda Levy. It will be a trans-textual commentary on a phantom speculative/science fiction/dystopian novella written by me, called I Am The Woo, about an insectoid cult in the future whose members ritually consume an organism from Saturn called Saturnialis gnostica or ‘the woo’.15 This part of the chapter is a meta-logical text or a “bonus track”, as it gives voice to both Magda’s alterity, outside of the hegemony/canonical idea of the text, and also to a story which, although not yet written, in part has performed and informed my creative process in writing Order of Our Lady Cicada. It also attempts to answer “how did I get here?” using a “ficto-critical” methodology, an approach that I have theorised in more depth in the literature review above. Effectively, the process, as I have chosen to work with it, is an act of “deforming” literature’s limits, as Derrida

15 I Am The Woo is at the time of writing this thesis unwritten. 180 presciently defined it (52). The background is that Magda has returned from Japan, in the process of integrating as her insect self and now initiated into the Order of Our Lady Cicada. She returns to university to study a postgraduate degree in English, focusing on “becoming.” Magda’s writing in the second part of this chapter is nomadic, working in the shifting zone between truth and fiction, just as Magda herself exists in that zone. It is literary trickery, and also an attempt at exploring laterally what has influenced my creative practice besides the theory and other texts which I have explored above. It was my intention that in engaging Magda’s voice ficto-critically, I would be able to trick myself into writing what has actually inspired me creatively, which would not necessarily have been available through writing about my work in a traditionally linear, exegetic way. Magda’s reading of I Am The Woo is an act of self-hypnosis or dowsing unconscious territory, thereby deterritorialising more linear ways of knowing. It is approaching the unconscious place that creativity comes from fluidly and indirectly, treating like with like as a process of extrac- tion. The phantom text, I Am The Woo, and reading it through the supra-textual perspective of a “fictional” character is a line of flight from established doctoral norms and ontologies,16 informed by “an entire politics of becomings-animal, as well as a politics of sorcery, which is elaborated in assemblages that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the State” (Deleuze and Guat- tari 247). I have engaged the process in the postmodern context of the ever-shifting and collapsing critical distance of the scholar. My desire to challenge the typical canonical expository exegesis is because I have found it problematic as a form of knowledge construction; thus the trickster in me is compelled to challenge traditional forms of knowledge construction. However, before I present Magda’s perspective, I, as “myself,”17 will address the novella as a minor form of literature, followed by a critical reading of Order of Our Lady Cicada. I begin with a recollection that someone (possibly a parent) said to me once that the “teenage years” were an “apprenticeship for adulthood.” Perhaps this is so in some cases, yet I would argue that in others, the adult years are a withered, enfeebled version of the comparatively libidinal and exuberant teenage period. I hold that a similar point of differentiation can exist with novels and novellas. While Margaret Atwood is one my favourite authors, her novel The Heart Goes Last (1-416) could have been easily been told with half of the words. By its end, it became ridiculous, “increasingly

16 Is Magda fictional or is she real? Are you fictional or are you real?

17 Whatever “myself” is, is outside the ambit of this thesis to inquire about, save to say that I am less interested in what Braidotti refers to as an authoritarian centralised supervising self (118) as I have referred to in the literature review. 181 more slapstick” (Johnston). Like Stephen Emms, I too, have fallen out of love with Murakami, but unlike Emms, my reason is less that his symbols are “hermetic to the last,”18 but rather that most of his novels now are simply too long, often containing well more than enough “opaque plot shifts” (Emms). Robert McCrum, in an article on the novella, with the byline “crimes against brevity,” quotes Samuel Johnson — “Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe and The Pilgrim's Progress?” While there have been other literary texts besides the above which have caused me to read the acknowledgements in the hope of extracting more from the author (Olivia E. Butler’s Bloodchild is one such example), my point here is that out of my affection for brevity, it felt appropriate ending Order of Our Lady Cicada where I ended it, albeit (and maybe especially) that it does not necessarily end with a tidy conclusion. For me, the story reached its natural end at novella length. Rather than try to extend it into a Franzen-sized brick or an Atwood trilogy, I elected to theorise it as a minoritarian work, which also adheres with my interest in minoritarian literature. Like a pair of culottes, the novella itself is liminal; not short and not long. And like the sans-culottes — direct democracy activists in the French Revolution (Scurr 447) — it aims to unsettle the hegemon, in this case the novel. Whether this makes my work more like a teenager, a pair of confusing pants or a movement of revolutionaries, viva la novella!19 This brings me to the section of the exegesis where I conduct a reading of Order of Our Lady Cicada. It is in part an act of post-rationalisation, as I can only attempt a recall of what I was thinking and feeling at the time of writing it. Even a moment after writing a fictional sentence, it can be difficult to commit to precisely what the thinking was which was behind it. However, with my fiction writing, the conscious intent is to have the reader feel as though the writing itself and their own reality is seamless, as though they are there, experiencing the narrative and as though the narrative is experiencing them. Further, it is difficult to know what the unconscious drives were which influenced my process. Despite this, below I make my best attempt to subject my own text to a reading of (non)representations of insects, metamorphosis and tricksters within, just as I have subjected all of the other texts to such an analysis. But first, I will provide some background to the “birthing”’ of the story. I woke up one day and the protagonist of Order of Our Lady Cicada, Mag- da, was talking to me. My interest in and knowledge of tricksters was extant, having studied them as part of my Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in my creative writing thesis. I have been through a num-

18 In fact I enjoy the hermetic aspects to Murakami’s work.

19 “Viva la Novella” is the name of a literary competition run by Seizure journal which I may enter Order of Our Lady Cicada in. 182 ber of metamorphoses in my life, particularly through my recovery from post-traumatic stress. Fur- ther, insects have plagued me and inspired me creatively for some time. It was Magda who suggested that together, we should write on tricksters, insects and metamorphoses. However, neither she nor I had any idea at the outset of how these currents would flow together in the greater literary and exegetical processes. At the time that Magda began speaking to me, I had not yet even read Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Often, at the beginning of writing Order of Our Lady Cicada, I would stop and scratch my head and, after eliminating the possibility that I had head lice,20 I would ask Magda, “where is this going? What is going to happen?” Her reply was always abrupt: “Just keep writing.” I theorise this as a rhizomatic approach to working, in the sense that I had no formal narrative arc structure or ending in mind; I, with trust in Magda, allowed it to flow. So it follows that (probably) nothing in Order of Our Lady Cicada was written in order to achieve a certain aspect of the overall thesis, as the writing of the novella did not occur in such a linear, conscious or teleological manner. It is my sense that the creative work played out conve- niently to the matter of the thesis; for the most part it and the exegesis grew together, twining, braid- ing, mutually supporting and provoking one another. But while the two papers have most often overlapped, at other times they have missed each other entirely, just as my thesis on trickster insect metamorphoses, itself, at times misses the mark as a way to read the other texts I selected. I also support Smith and Dean’s position that:

…creative practice — the training and specialised knowledge that creative practitioners have and the processes they engage in when they are making art — can lead to specialised research insights which can then be generalised and written up as research. (5)

Informed by this idea, during my doctoral candidacy, I sought out and benefited greatly from at- tending regular seminars at the former Centre for Cultural Partnerships at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne — a post-graduate, community-development based creative arts centre. During the seminars, many practice-based higher degree research projects and their relationship to theory were explored and discussed. Around the same time, I also participated in the “House of Wisdom,” a two week practice-based research residency at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery in Melbourne, facilitated by Dr David Cross and Dr Jem Noble, which aimed to deconstruct and re-

20 With a long-haired primary school aged child at the time of writing, this was always a possibility. 183 construct self-improvement through seminars and the collection and creation of artefacts, as well to reconsecrate the original House of Wisdom, a centre of learning in Iraq during its golden age. Fur- ther, I had the opportunity to write a play on insectoid metamorphosis with my supervisor Dr David Moody called Buzz, which was performed at Murdoch University on Saturday 12th August, 2017. Through all of the above processes, I was able to directly experience and hold in one hand, the key that creative process and art making can lead to research insights which can be generalised. I held in the other hand a sense of specificity, as distinct from generalising these insights, which I refer to throughout the thesis, in terms of the insect-sized nature of my observations and problematising of grand narratives. If I had a third hand, I would hold in it that the creative writing process is quite often (and certainly in my case, with my work) non-teleological and nomadic, leading both somewhere and nowhere at once. Indeed, there are many instances where my own text does not do what I would have liked it to do, particularly in comparison with Kafka’s originality and concreteness; I feel my work is derivative, overly metaphorical in places, bland and underwritten in others. Nor does my work capture the bitingly beautiful, complex symbiotic/trickster relation that Butler manages, or the thrilling speculative innovation of Langelaan. Due to the incommensurability of the dif- fering mediums, I shall not compare my work to Neumann’s or Cronenberg’s, except to say that both texts are very compelling and manage to provoke important questions around the human, post- human, metamorphic and corporeal, which I am uncertain I have managed to achieve. In any case, below, I am reading my novella in the same way that I have read the other texts, by using the topic — (non)representations of trickster insectoid metamorphosis, as a lantern with which to light up the story’s mystery. I will begin my discussion by first looking at the ways in which I attempted to make Order of Our Lady Cicada a non-representational concrete work, which lends itself to multiple metaphoric entry points, or none at all if a reader is not inclined to engage with it with the intent of meaning making. As mentioned above, it was never my intent to make it a work of grand, singular transcendent metaphor; rather, I aimed to make it a living, but small,21 minor and intimate story of metamorphoses. In terms of general concreteness in Order of Our Lady Cicada, as with Metamorphosis and the three “The Fly” texts, Magda does not just feel, think or act like an insect, she becomes one: “‘Well, now that you’re talking to me, not about me…I will say, it’s cool that you can see it, be-

21 I cannot emphasise enough how important it was to me to make my work small and specific. 184 cause….’ I faltered. How could I tell them I actually was an insect? That really, I had always been” (86). Also with regard to concreteness in the text, Magda not only changes her mental territory, she deterritorialises it entirely, in becoming nomad. Walking away is an act of decolonising herself:

“Where am I going, Kyoko? It’s time you told me.” It felt good to finally ask. “Fair enough, Magda. I thought you would’ve guessed. We are going to Japan. But we are not entering via the usual channels.” (27)

Magda’s shifts are psycho-geographical and sacred-geographical as well as corporeal,22 and are thus concrete in at least these two ways. However, it is also important to acknowledge that even though her own ethnicity is ambiguously Middle Eastern — her father invites her to eat ful with their family — because she is westernised, her journey to Japan, even if only temporary, could be

22 As outlined by Sadie Plant in The Most Radical Gesture — The Situationist Internationale in the Post- modern Age,

One of psychogeography’s principle means was the dérive. Long a favourite practice of the dadaists, who organised a variety of expeditions, and the surrealists, for whom the geographical form of automatism was an instructive pleasure, the dérive, or drift, was defined by the Situationists as the “technique of locomotion without a goal.”(58)

In an earlier draft of Order of Our Lady Cicada, I had many more psychogeographical scenes than remain in this final version, primarily wherein Magda drifts around Shikoku island studying edifices, urban and human flows. These did not serve the (post-human) narrative however and thus they presently dwell in a file on my hard-drive labelled “offcuts.” Perhaps these will be revivified in another story at a later stage. Alexander Dugin, although a neo-fascist and thus a theorist whose general ideas I oppose, articulates a sacred geographical position on the forest which mirrors Magda’s experience. In his “From Sacred Geog- raphy to Geopolitics” he refers to the forest as “the place of the priests” (druids, magi, hermits), but also at the same time the ‘place of demons,’ i.e. archaic residuals from a vanished past.” In the forest, Magda confronts personal and perhaps transpersonal demons and begins to come to terms with her own magi nature. Her voyage is both psychographical and sacred geographical. 185 read as neo-colonial, Orientalist, Other-raiding, in order to locate her “transcendent” self.23 Bron remarks on this:

“You are one of those sorta white, sorta not, shit-cunts who’s plundered the foreign Other to find their higher self! Only, your higher self is an insect! That’s fuckin’ funny, Magda! You’re a pisser.” (87)

Magda does not defend herself, because I wanted to leave this open and ambiguous; to let the reader decide on the ethics of it, due to its complexity. Indeed, there is a deliberate degree of irony and self-reflexivity on the part of some of the characters to attempt to problematise the psychedelic whiteness (Saldanha), which Magda and then later Tomas begins to engage in, at the invi- tation of Japanese members of the Order. Further, in terms of inter-cultural ethics, in having Magda undergo the Ohenro pilgrimage (or at least part of it) — a sacred geography (Ivakhiv 95) ritual engaged in normally by people approaching death, I am attempting to humble and discipline her with a kind of immanent initiatory encounter before she engages in her alkaloidal, metamorphic experience. This is in part to challenge the present trend of westerners (“shit-cunts?”) engaging with, and in many cases commodifying, “psychedelic” plant spirits/alkaloids for initiatory, psycho-therapeutic or addiction interruption purposes, without first being grounded in a culturally related (or any) spiritual discipline beforehand, thereby simply affirming their immunitarian individualism (Rodd 4) and a type of narcissism (Rodd 1). Magda’s discussion later in this chapter of the phantom text I Am The Woo depicts a scenario where potent organisms are appropriated and imbibed for spiritual purposes, which raise deep, difficult unconscious material, without the accountability and grounding of ances- tor veneration, a mystery school, traditional community, rigorous spiritual practice or critical theory.

23 Edward Said’s point is important, that,

the Orient is watched, since its almost (but never quite) offensive behaviour issues out of a reservoir of infinite peculiarity; the European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher, never involved, always detached, always ready for new examples of what the Description de l'Egypte called “bizarre jouissance.” The Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness.(103)

I agree that there was potential danger in this for me, as someone with Ukrainian and Polish Jewish ancestry who grew up in Australia, to fall into a degree of European watching. However it is not so clear cut. I am also half Egyptian to begin, thus I am, it could be argued, already part of the Orient. Secondly, it is also interesting to me, Said’s use of “queerness” as pejorative, as this term has been reclaimed and I too would consider myself someone who queers normativity, I am therefore unconcerned by being part of its living tableau. The role strikes me as performative and not frozen, just merely still for a moment, long enough for a European to think they have estimated me/us, when in reality, I/we are inestimable. In this respect, I reclaim and own any Orientalist writings in this dissertation as my ancestors’ birthright. 186 Magda’s pilgrimage is in a sense a kind of disciplinary practice or initiation which she engages in before she is allowed to imbibe the plant spirit. In further defence of it, I have drawn on Ivakhiv, who argues:

New Age pilgrimage practices deviate substantially from tourist encounters with landscape; in them, visuality is demoted, and to a large extent sup- planted, by practices aimed at ‘attuning’ oneself to voices, channels, and invisible energies harboured by the landscape. (98)

This is not say that New Age movements, practices and philosophies are unproblematic; however I have written Magda’s encounter with landscape as an intervention to colonial representations of landscape. Whilst Magda has to some degree a visual/spectacle type encounter with the landscape, I have written her as more attuned (Ivakhiv 98) and immanent with it, which defies the typical com- modification that one might argue dominates New Age sacred geography and ontology in the context of late capitalism. Here, Magda’s visual encounter is ambiguously pareidolic24 , dialogic and agnostic, hopefully challenging New Age narcissism which sometimes says, “it’s all you!” (Rodd, 1):

I walked slowly around, watching the trees all the while. Faces appeared in the various arrangements of their leaves and the spaces around them, and in the knots and burrs on their trunks. Some of the trees wore eager grins and winked, as though glad I was there. Some appeared weary, their features drooping. Others looked cross, with mean eyes and hard lines formed by twigs for mouths. It was fairly obvious to me that their expressions mirrored the spectrum of my own thoughts and feelings about the walk. But that didn’t stop me wondering if they were autonomous beings, or simply tiny portions of my ego, disowned, split off and anthropomorphising objects around me. “Are you me, or something more?’ I demanded of one such tricky looking face, formed by the leaves of a shrub. It nodded in the breeze. (50)

24 It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore pareidolia in detail, however according to Bednarik, it refers to the phenomenon of “experiencing meaningful patterns in random stimuli.” (1) 187 Returning now to the issue of concreteness in the text, Magda is locked out of much communication in Japan due to her inability to speak or understand the local language. Aside from this, she is also alien to many cultural customs of the place and can often only speculate as to the meaning of what is occurring around her. Although she is fortunate to find quite a few people who speak at least some English, culturally, linguistically and corporeally she is still very much an Other and is therefore, as a meaning-making subject, in a comparatively less representational space than the lo- cals, even if she is herself always being represented by them. Her observation of the bus driver, whose bus she attempts to climb onto while asking in English if she can and without being part of its tour group, is indicative of this:

“Jousha dekimasen,” he replied, which I did not understand. I was quite bamboozled by his flapping hands. It was almost avant-garde. I raised my arms up, my palms parallel to the sky and begged, “Please!?” In reply, he formed an “X” with his arms, now saying something else which I couldn’t understand, this time his voice significantly louder than before. (42)

I wrote this with a sense of irony and ambiguity to perhaps reflect all at once on Magda’s alterity and neo-colonial/Orientalist interloping, as well as the perversity of authority and private property in the context of liberalism. Magda also spends a quite some time on her own between encounters with friends, during which she is left only with her own senses, feelings, thoughts and her perceptions of thought-forms, none of which portend or pretend to reveal a greater, transcendent ontology or master narrative around why she is doing what she is doing, besides that it is for the purpose of an ambiguous sense of change. I do make hints in places at the conditions of late capitalist alienation and fragmentation, however this is not an attempt at narrativising a structured political telos. I may in some ways consider myself a spiritual anarchist in the tradition of Tolstoy, but I do not profess that a manifesto or cohesive discourse could be extracted from the pages of Order of Our Lady Cicada, notwithstanding that someone, someday, might try. It follows that Magda is on no grandiose world-saving or religious mission, only a pilgrimage to her insect self, which paradoxically is both about herself as a tiny, insectoid individual and about something bigger, a collective. Magda herself does not even begin to fully apprehend this cognitively until near the end of the novella, and even then, I deliberately left the story very ambiguous. I did, however, hold patterns of decline in insect diversity and abundance in the context of 188 the Anthropocene (Hallman et al.) in mind throughout the entire time of writing this thesis. Most certainly this has been a pressing concern to me for some time and has in part motivated me to attempt to challenge the notion of insect otherness. But it is not my intent to push this didactically. Rather it is a subliminal hum that I am transmitting. Further in terms of concreteness and non-closure of narrative in Order of Our Lady Cicada, I have attempted to write Magda intimately, to reveal her disordered behaviours and neuroses, not from a transcendent place but from an embedded, embodied place; the reader does not have any omniscient privileged access to what is going on or why it is going on for her. Ideally, she and her relations are as much mysteries to the reader as they are to themselves. Moreover, I tried to write her as shrouded in her own mental confusion and tricky shifting thought patterns/thought-forms, wrapped up in the chrysalis of her becoming, as a suggestion but never as an overbearing narrative interference to her experience:

…this crone in my imagination had begun throwing rusted can lids like ninja stars, their jagged edges lodging in the foreheads of passersby. The vision was perversely amusing for a moment, but too disturbing for me to allow it to continue. Was it a product of my mind? Or was it conjured by other beings, who hid in the mountains and in the hollows of trees? I craned my neck to look up at the pointed tops of the cedars and pines, but they bore no answers. They only wore shrouds of mist. (39)

In an attempt to avoid overly representational writing, I have deliberately attempted to repli- cate Magda’s voice, with fidelity to how it has sounded to me — somewhat blunted, melancholic and ambiguous — hopefully avoiding the risk of writing her or her lines of flight with too much of what Wood refers to as a certain kind of “vitality” (42). It was also my intent to avoid straying into the related pejorative genre area “hysterical realism” instead of magical realism (Wood 41). How- ever, because “hysterical” is a very gendered term, I would rename the attempt to comment on too much postmodern territory as “transcendence mania,” distinguishing it as writing too energetically and stridently with an assumed bird’s-eye perspective. It was easy enough to avoid transcendence mania, as Magda’s whispered and flattened ironic affect came through in the timbre of her voice, in my own mind, while she sat beside me, dictat- ing. Below is one such moment, where instead of Magda forming a transcendent theorem on cultur-

189 al differences and the hegemony of western rationality, she merely makes a dry but unappreciated attempt at humour:

“She wants to know if you would like to listen to an English show on an international radio station?” “I’d probably rather music.” I replied and the two women conferred again. “She said the English show is very informative,” Kyoko’s smile seemed ever so slightly tense. “Okay, then. I suppose we can never have enough English information,” I replied, with no confirmation forthcoming that they’d enjoyed my sarcasm or even apprehended it. (29)

Further on this point, I have been inspired by Calvino’s notion of lightness, and his reflection on Ovid’s Metamorphoses:

…the lightness, of which Perseus is the hero, could not be better represented than by this gesture of refreshing courtesy toward a being so monstrous and terrifying yet at the same time somehow fragile and perishable. (6)

I included the above quote, because although I read it and Ovid’s Metamorphoses after writing the interaction at the end of the novella between Magda and the insect being, it seemed to capture perfectly what I was trying to do with the insect being, and I can only hope that the novella as a whole, echoes this kind of writing. My intention, in trying to write Magda’s confrontation with the insect creature light, is an attempt at not telling “how the world works” (Wood 42). This lighter, smaller (insect-sized) writing seems more immanent, corporeal writing; to tell how the world works implies a kind of grandiose and therefore perhaps heavy narrative perspective. Certainly earlier iterations of my work on this project, particularly when the genre was more dystopian and speculative, presented with more of the characteristics of heavy-handed mania. However by the time I came to this story, involving Magda, Bron, Tomas, Kyoko, Michiko, Daisuke and the Order, I had crossed a certain threshold, having realised how much I wanted to scale the project back and become intimately immanent, tiny even. Whether this has translated to non-representational corporeal writing however, from the points of view of my readers I cannot be sure, but from my point of view, it was 190 an aim I held close while working on the project. It also helped my breath stay even and allowed me to sleep at nights without the disruptive midnight obsession with dreaming up a magnum opus or planet-saving treatise. Quite helpfully, Magda herself, as a clearly defined voice that I could hear with my “third ear,” reminded me constantly to just write and not worry about what the story was about. Her presence somehow discouraged me from using the sacredness of art to push the faux-sacredness of grand narratives and heavy-handed representation. There are definite moments when I do stray somewhat into the turf of didacticism, such as when Magda and Bron attend an environment centre soup kitchen and watch an agricultural documentary which is being screened. Here I am trying to raise an anti-capitalist/critical animal studies perspective (“big farm-a” [23]) in the sense that, “what he was talking about was apocalyptic” (23). I accept there is a certain density or crudeness to that, as I read it now from the exegetical perspective, yet I am choosing to leave it in the story as a contrast to the brief, confused and ambiguous attempt at a political debate between Magda and Bron afterwards. That debate turns out to be nothing more than an unconscious attempt by Magda to pick a fight, predominantly on emotional grounds, yet still tinged with political dissent: “Hey! Virtue signalling? You been on the fascist forums again? Who’s the fucking identitarian snowflake? Anyway, at least I am being a bit reflexive and…” (24) Here, I am attempting to refer to, or (non)represent, present political confusion and obfuscation around liberalism, Marxism and the emergence of neo-fascism/neo-reactionism (the “alt” right). I was hoping to reflect on some of the political naivety that has been recuperated by fascist ideo- logues and demagogues, namely that liberalism and Marxism are somehow symbiotic. The catch- cry of neo-fascists (some seem confused and to genuinely think that they are libertarians, where others seem to be quite disingenuously manipulating discourse) is that “cultural Marxism” is destroying western values (Jamin 1). It is outside the scope of this thesis to explore this notion and the dynamics around it with any depth; however, I wish to highlight it as a cultural and temporal marker in the text and a brief moment where I perhaps step out of concrete writing to make the beginning of a point, then step back in, through the non-resolution of the argument between Magda and Bron. Ultimately I was attempting to keep the system open, to not stitch it up with any clearly defined political position or critique, rather to allow the characters to tell their own stories of being from a particular class which I would refer to in a broader philosophical sense, as a post-traumatic class or a “libidinal proletariat” (Žižek 23). Further on (non)representations in the text, in particular where it occurs in concreteness and corporeality, when Magda meets Kyoko, it’s all about hair: 191 We were standing before grimy mirrors in the beachside change-rooms, negotiating hair. She gathered hers in sections, combing and drying them as she went, using a small cordless hair dryer. These efforts produced a sleek sheet of hair like black water, while my use of a plastic hairbrush seemed only to turn my ocean-matted clumps to auburn fairy floss. With heavy-lidded eyes stinging from salt, I watched her twist her locks into a loose bun atop her head and fasten it with a simple wooden clip. (7)

Here again, I experiment with giving away little, in terms of narrativising, as to what is actually going on with Magda’s mental concepts. The focus is more on the corporeal:

Lying in the silence, the bedsheet was cool against the heat of my sunburned skin. I closed my eyes and in my mind I could still see the ocean glittering and could feel the waves breaking against my body, at first cajoling, then pushing, pulling, until I tumbled with them. Around and around I went, drawn beneath as though by thousands of tiny hands. Again and again I’d emerge, gasping for air, only for the cycle to repeat. Then, after my swim (which had really been more a kind of tussle with the ocean), half prone, I’d watched the heaving tide. From my place of respite on the hot sand, I’d wondered if the sea had also felt me with its watery hands. Soon after, I’d met Kyoko. (10)

I am including another embodied moment below, to further illustrate my creative interest in the corporeal. It is a moment in the novella that I particularly like, and the idea came from a “selfie” I took many years ago in Fremantle, which is likely the unnamed city in which Order of Our Lady Cicada begins and ends:

I watched Kyoko’s face, bejewelled with light filtering through the grain of her straw hat. Whilst she listened, she dabbed at perspiration on her nose with the corner of a prim lace handkerchief. The sun seared over our heads. (14)

192 Having discussed corporeal and (non)representational aspects of my text, I will now look at metamorphoses in Order of Our Lady Cicada. As I mentioned above, just as Kafka, Butler, Lange- laan, Neumann and Cronenberg all write very concretely about metamorphoses, I have also attempted this in my novella. Unlike the other texts though, there is a much slower and more ambiguous lead-in, and the novella’s cosmology is under question throughout much of the novella — whether or not Magda’s insectoid assailant and the other phenomena she experiences are fabulation. By the end however, she has met her assailant and it is now likely that it is as real as she is, even to the extent of possessing its own subjectivity, although I left this deliberately inconclusive. An accord in ceremony is made between them that they will merge, or they recognise that they were always a hybrid/composite being, and the next thing we know, Magda is no longer a human being, but an insect/human becoming: “It said with no actual words: ‘I made you to remind me, and I’ve been here so you’d forget. And we are sorry.’” (80). This metamorphosis is different from what occurs with André and Seth Brundle in the various versions of “The Fly.” First of all, in Order of Our Lady Cicada, the insectoid-human merger or hybridisation occurs mutually; both agents eventually choose this union, whereas in the former, it occurs accidentally at the hands of hubristic scientists, the flies being unconscious interlopers in experiments gone wrong. Secondly, whereas all versions of “The Fly” are materialist in their implicit cosmology, the insectoid agent in my novella is a being of another/imbricated dimension, an astral entity or energy. But for Magda, it may as well be a being of the material realm, as she fears it as much as she would a physical intruder: “Behind my cheap Kmart curtain, the insect creature hid, thrumming, reverberating, while I lay frozen” (22). However, through her merger with the astral insect-being, they each embody each other, in a New Materialist encounter. Together, they incarnate their hybridity, perhaps like Deleuze and Guattari’s orchid and the wasp, a multispecies relationship and a rhizome wherein the orchid orchestrates the wasp to mate with it by appearing and behaving as another wasp, result- ing in the propagation of its seed (11). In this sense, Magda’s and the insect’s symbiotic metamorphosis is probably closer in essence to the relation between Gan and T’Gatoi in Butler’s Bloodchild than to the scientist man and fly in “The Fly” inter-texts. One of the ways in which Gan’s metamorphoses unfolds is through his softening and opening to intimacy with T’Gatoi. This is somewhat enabled through his drinking of her egg, just as for Magda, her imbibing of the plant sacrament opens her vibrantly to a kind of “sacred marriage” or union with the insect. In exploring the metamorphic theme, and reminiscent perhaps of Gan’s resistance to T’Ga- toi, and Gregor’s resistance to his insect self, I have attempted to write on Magda’s resistance to her 193 metamorphosis, and indeed, much of the story is a exploration of this resistance. Before discovering what she is, she must spend most of the novella confronting what she is not. Probably the most acute example of this confrontation is when she runs into an oncoming bicycle by accident, because she has a flight response at discovering that her two friends know each other and may be colluding/ cooperating. Her resistance and feeling of betrayal here is not inexplicable; however, it results in an ambulance ride to the hospital and some physical pain and discomfort — a far worse fate than is actually at play: her two new friends are part of an organisation which supports people and insects to “become.” Although I did not write it overtly, I can see afterwards, that the situation could potentially (non)represent that the impact of the non-integration of Magda’s body/mind and of her distrust, could be doing worse than simply not serving her; these things are hurting her. Further on metamorphoses in my novella, there is a corporeal scene where Magda’s former housemates, Tomas in particular, begins to notice her changing — “‘Oh yes, that,’ I half-whispered, bringing my hand to my face and running it along the outline of the long proboscis which protruded from my mouth and nose area. It felt both fuzzy and firm at once” (87). The final metamorphic moment is when Magda flies off the pages of the novella, and into the present chapter of the exegesis. This is her ultimate metamorphic apotheosis, where she is no longer only of the text, but actually becomes its author, both subject and object, and deterritorialising the betwixt and between. Having covered (non)representations and metamorphosis in the text, and the insect themes all the way through it, I will now look at tricksters. Most of the characters in my novella Order of Our Lady Cicada bear traits of tricksters. Magda, Bron and Tomas are border creatures, living at the margins, libidinally, materially and ethnically insider/outsiders, challenging the status quo through their lifestyles and refusal/inability to engage “meaningfully” in society by doing “bullshit jobs.”25 Kyoko bears trickster qualities too, but in a different way to Magda, Bron and Tomas. She tricks Magda into going to Japan and she never reveals that Magda is initiating into an ancient mystery school until it is happening. With regard to this dynamic, Magda too is a trickster, stumbling by to-

25 David Graeber named this phenomenon and writes on how in the last century in the United States of America, there has been a,

ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.

Of particular relevance to the characters, Magda, Bron and Tomas, Graeber refers to the “moral and spiritual damage” that comes from bullshit jobs. He argues that “it is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.” 194 tal accident upon a situation which enables her to slip between the profane and divine realms, and integrate both. As referred to in the previous section, Michiko and Kyoko also trick Magda, hiding from her the fact that they already know each other and are cooperating:

“Who were you speaking to?” My voice shook. “Kyoko, of course!” she said, smiling widely. “Who?’” I thought I’d heard correctly, but wanted her to say it again, so I could be very sure. She repeated Kyoko’s name. The world outside seemed to push in on the walls. In turn, I could feel them, the walls, moving to enclose me. (58)

Besides her tricky encounters with the insect being, Magda’s relation with the landscape in Japan is also tricky. As I have referred to in previous sections, she perceives elementals and various other otherworldly beings around her. Perhaps this is pareidolia, or perhaps she is having an animist experience. There is no intrinsic or stable conclusion. Having covered many of the traces and (non)representations of insect trickster in Order of Our Lady Cicada, I will now hand over this chapter to Magda Levy to discuss my phantom text, I Am The Woo.

195 Two Bloods Part II In which Magda Levy reads another story by Michelle Braunstein called I Am The Woo

The following paper is a close reading of a dystopian/speculative/science fiction novella by author Michelle Braunstein called I Am The Woo. The story tells of an underground initiatory group through the experience of its protagonist, Malochi. Through my reading of it, I will explore the themes of insects, tricksters and metamorphoses in the text, but first I will give an overview of the story and as well will compare it to my own experiences as written about in Braunstein’s novella Order of Our Lady Cicada. It is 2105 and earth and its denizens are in the thrall of neoliberalism’s ultimate telos: there are two corporations, “Pachamama” and “Sirius,” which control nearly all industry, governance and culture. Most of the earth’s plant species have either been bio-pirated, synthesised or made extinct. Animals are highly prized commodities, primarily used for fashion and spiritual practice, however humans rarely eat them, instead existing on synthetic food. Scientists are crawling over other planets seeking new organisms and minerals to attempt to keep earth viable for the remaining human population after several significant die-offs. Because there is so little left of the earthly material, people are turning to highly individualised, sanitised and commodified forms of the “spiritual.” The latest animal ritual trend, as dictated by celebrity shamans, is a revivified/appropriated ritual from an ancient Meso-American culture, involving spending twenty-four hours in a circle, “drawn at midnight in the cracked earth” (Braunstein 32), alone except for the presence of a rattle snake. The novella’s protagonist, Malochi, breeds bespoke mice which she then sells to others who breed snakes for aforementioned spiritual purposes. She spends the rest of her time working on her pirate radio show and playing computer games in her mind while connected to The Internet of Everything. She feels paralysed by deep depression and anxiety, until she experiences a metamorphosis through her engagement with an organism found on Saturn, officially called Saturnialis gnostica, or “the woo” by its spiritual initiates. Scientists know little about the organism, only that it is created by an insect type creature newly discovered on Saturn. Rather than comprising of hexa- gons like honeycomb, the structure of “the woo” is octagonal. It also contains a very powerful alka- loid-like substance, giving those who consume it a deep nightmarish trip which lasts several days, after which they find themselves transformed, freed of many self-limiting beliefs and addictions and with feelings of deeper connection to themselves, the earth, the cosmos, their ancestors and with greater facility to cope with the (entropic) society in which they live.

196 Written in the first person, I Am The Woo is narrated by Malochi, who documents her experiences of working with the woo, both imbibing it and supporting others in doing so, in neo- shamanic rituals run by the group. Braunstein charts Malochi’s experiences over several years, in which she undergoes a series of metamorphoses; at the beginning of the story, she uses many kinds of measures to avoid feeling her feelings. By the end of the novel she is free of vice and has a sense of spaciousness around her. Simultaneously she experiences an incrementally growing awareness of problematic/cultic behaviours of certain people within the group, including her own problematically enabling behaviour. Quite ironically, her repeated engagement with the woo eventually strengthens her enough to become aware of the exploitative behaviours of Asquif, the cult’s leader and the various ways in which his inner cabal of cult members uncritically valorise everything he says and does. The situation comes to a head when, days after Malochi privately confronts Asquif about his lying and un- derhanded acts of cruelty and manipulation, one by one, unbeknownst to each other, various others members of the cult also begin to challenge his questionable ethics. One such dissident is Asquif’s working partner Otterson, who, after his own intensive encounter with the woo, refuses to work with Asquif until he acknowledges his impropriety and commits to stopping it. Characteristically vengeful and embittered, Asquif refuses to back down, escalating the conflict by undermining the dissidents and poisoning their relationships with other more acquiescent cult members, simultaneously obfuscating his own predatory, dishonest and dangerous behaviours. His campaign continues unabated even when he finds himself detained for fraud and deported to his birth place, a space station in Saturn’s orbit. From there, he attempts to extend his tentacles of manipulation, mainly threatening to frame and take cult members down with him if they do not support him. Braunstein’s writing of the characters with a sense of ambiguity and complexity is possibly an attempt at writing non-representationally, however it is problematic at best and dangerous at worst. She seems at times to make concessions to the exploitative ways of Asquif and the inherently patriarchal structure of the woo cult by over-emphasising the metamorphic benefit to Malochi from imbibing the woo. Further, in her depiction of Asquif as being tyrannised by the larger exploitative system and culture, her work fails to be critical enough of him, or to insist on his unconditional duty of care. Although I found it believable that his eventual demise is in part due to the hyper neoliber- al/market-based approach that people in I Am The Woo take to spirituality — to many members of the cult, Asquif’s style simply and quickly becomes archaic and there is always a newer, shinier process tempting them — at times this is too relaxed a position. Braunstein’s refusal to conclude weakens the narrative. 197 To give more context to the extremes of neo-liberal self-improvement that the characters engage in in I Am the Woo, “immersion” is “trending”. Initiates are lowered into a pit of maggots while being subjected to the quick and nuanced pulsing of multi-directional strobe lighting. The fa- cilitators claim that the maggot immersion is physically regenerative through the de-briding of dead skin tissue and “dead energy” (18). The energetic “debridement” occurs when the strobe lighting pattern nauseates initiates and catalyses them to purge; “It’s the new edge for tired seekers,” (Braunstein 19), Malochi remarks to Otterson about the maggot immersion, perhaps with a degree of irony, while they sit together at a table preparing woo for an upcoming ceremony. For Malochi, the situation is complex. As a post-human, she is capable of holding opposing realities: Asquif has made it possible for her to have transformative encounters with the woo, but he has also been trickily seeking personal fulfilment (sex/money/power) through colonially plundering an “alien” organism and leading an exploitative cult. One might consider I Am The Woo and Order of Our Lady Cicada by Braunstein to be sister works, as while they are vastly different, there are some common themes. I also wonder if the stories that Braunstein presents have been drawn from her own life experiences; however as she herself mentions in the fourth chapter of her thesis, “linking biography to a text is always somewhat speculative” (158). I reflect on my own metamorphic encounter with a sense of relief because whereas Malochi has been tricked and manipulated by Asquif I have had nothing of the sort to deal with in my relation with Kyoko, Michiko and Daisuke or any of the Ipsissima in The Order. Of course there were times in my adventure when I did not know who to trust and small shamanic tricks were played on me to guide me towards my metamorphosis. And although my openness to realms beyond the five senses is foregrounded in the story, neither Braunstein nor any of the characters treat me as an unre-

198 liable narrator. This is very different to Malochi’s experience in “I Am the Woo” where she is actively “gaslit” by Asquif.26 Having read of Malochi’s experiences in I Am The Woo, I feel I am witnessing something almost archetypal about certain kinds of new religions or metamorphic cults and how they can be both abusive and liberatory for people simultaneously. Matthew Remski writes on “dharma cults” in his blog post, “Don’t Deepen Your Practice,” referring specifically to the Buddhist cult, Shambhala, and Osho’s Rahjeeshpuram among others. He is quite scathing in his analysis, yet I celebrate his grounding of New Age phenomena in materialist politics and agree with the importance of ac- knowledging that “yoga and meditation cults…emerged in tandem with how neoliberalism mo- bilised post-war wealth towards an internal turn. This internal turn spiritualised consumerism and conflated globalisation with universal consciousness” (Remski). I bear witness to this phenomenon in contemporary society and Braunstein’s speculative/dystopian work certainly evidences spiritualised consumerism. That the two mega corporations controlling much of the world’s services, resources and culture/s are called “Pachamama” and “Sirius” says something very literal about the conflation of “globalisation with universal consciousness” (Remski). I find it interesting that Braunstein chose to quote Osho on the topic of trust in Order of Our Lady Cicada, given that, “numerous charges of wrongdoing had been made against him and his leading disciples” (Pace). Interestingly too, Asquif was deported from earth in I Am The Woo for felonies related to immigration, just as Osho was deported from the United States of America for the same (Pace). I feel it is important to make a distinction however, between the two teachers, and point out that in no way is Asquif as learned, intelligent or influential a trickster as Osho was. Where Osho was a scholar of literature and a master with language — skills he used to deliver profound teachings — quite amusingly, Braunstein has written Asquif as a kind of derivative or carica- ture of a guru, replete with an excessively sleazy type of charisma and the disarming illusion of

26 According to Stark,

the term “gaslighting” has recently entered the philosophical lexicon. The literature on gaslighting has two strands. In one, gaslighting is characterised as a form of tes- timonial injustice. As such, it is a distinctively epistemic injustice that wrongs per- sons primarily as knowers. Gaslighting occurs when someone denies, on the basis of another’s social identity, her testimony about a harm or wrong done to her. In the other strand, gaslighting is described as a form of wrongful manipulation and, indeed, a form of emotional abuse. This follows the use of “gaslighting” in therapeutic practice. On this account, the aim of gaslighting is to get another to see her own plausible perceptions, beliefs, or memories as groundless. (221)

Asquif gaslights Malochi through both modes, undermining her testimony to others in the group and also using his position as a spiritual teacher to instil self-doubt in her about her own perceptions. 199 vulnerability, juxtaposed with an obvious unscrupulousness, the latter being a quality which the emotionally susceptible cult members struggle to see at first. Towards the end of Braunstein’s novel, Malochi coincidentally meets J9, who is formerly from the Saturn space station, Asquif’s birthplace. She explains to Malochi that Asquif's prior employment was in recycled paper doily sales while running a “tantric” bestiality cult on the side.27 J9 laughs at the idea of him running his own metamorphic cult on earth and reveals to Malochi, “we used to call him the Tempter. He was always trying to flog doilies or sex with pigs!” (73). Although Asquif’s history is disturbing to Malochi, Braunstein neglects to problematise J9’s nonchalance and amusement at the rape of animals. It becomes yet another marker in the novel of the disturbing reality of the earth in 2105, reflecting too on present times and the shadow of humanism’s normalisa- tion of rape culture. Knowing from biographical research that Braunstein admires the work of Mar- garet Atwood, perhaps here she references the relativistic society in her Oryx and Crake, in which there is a thriving child sex slave trade, child exploitation material is legally available online and streamed openly by high school students. (103) Given the comparatively more dystopian reality in I Am the Woo as compared with Order of Our Lady Cicada, I feel another possible way to relate to the two texts, apart from being sibling texts, is that the former is the “shadow text” to the latter, a rather grittier version of it. Although Or- der of Our Lady Cicada contains characters who are dealing with pain, fragmentation, ennui and injustice, it has been written more lightly than its sister has. I Am The Woo is a bleaker, sarcastic, dystopian text; a dark mirror. Yet both most certainly share traces of tricksters, insects and metamorphoses. Apart from these issues of the light and shadow (a false dichotomy to be sure, as there is both light and dark in both texts), the other major difference in the texts concerns temporality. Whereas Order of Our Lady Cicada focuses on my life over a number of weeks in present times (late in the second decade of the 2000s) dealing with my insectoid metamorphoses in a slipstream/ magical realism genre, in I Am The Woo Braunstein looks at the lives of beings decades into the future with space travel at their disposal. In this sense, it makes the text more similar to Octavia E.

27 On the Saturn space station in I Am The Woo, recycled paper doilies are on-trend as is the tantric practice of bestiality, which may have its precedent in ancient India. According to Rita Banerji, “bestiality was, in fact, practiced…as part of sacred ceremonies, as evidenced by the sacred ashvamedha ceremony.” Further on multi-species sexuality, Banerji refers to depictions in ancient Hindu tantric art of “women engaging with trees, with each type of tree getting aroused by different gestures from the women, ranging from a smile, a glance or a kiss to a kick from a foot adorned with a silver anklet.” There is not a great deal of other material available evidencing these practices historically, however it seems for some characters in I Am The Woo, the mere suggestion of a tantric association is enough for them to try to claim any and all of their fetishes are spiritual. 200 Butler’s text Bloodchild, explored earlier in this dissertation, in terms of both genre and the era of its setting. All three texts, Bloodchild, Order of Our Lady Cicada and I Am The Woo explore the complexity of beings and systems which can be seen as both constructive and damaging at the same time, holding tensions of presence and absence, self and other (alterity), human and non-human. Perhaps instrumental to this complexity is the existence of an organic soma or sacrament in each of the texts, which, by catalysing a kind of psychic death or new trauma in its initiate, enables the characters to experience a degree of psychic distance from their pre-existing traumas, supporting integration of the disparateness of their fragmented selves. Braunstein theorises the soma/sacrament in the literature review through Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, referring to the plant/animal spirits employed for sacramental purposes in each text, in the previous chapter, I Heard a Fly Buzz — When I Died (154). Further on psychic death, and expanding here on his libidinal proletariat which I mentioned above, Žižek posits:

We are dealing, say, with a victim of Alzheimer’s, it is not merely that his or her awareness is severely constrained, that the scope of the Self is dimin- ished — we are literally no longer dealing with the same Self. After the trauma, another subject emerges, we are talking to a stranger (306).

I share with Malochi, Gan and his mother Lien, the experiences of psychic death through overwhelming psychic pain/trauma, making us all a libidinal proletariat, but also through our engagement with interplanetary and earthly sacraments/somas, making us trickily something or someone else altogether. Following our imbibing of the plant, woo and egg respectively, we are each not the same Self. Somas, sacraments, Selfs and psychic deaths aside, now it is time, as Braunstein has done with the other six texts in this exegesis, to look at traces of insectoid trickster metamorphoses in I Am The Woo. The first obvious reference in the novel to insects is during the ceremonial process where the cult members imbibe the Saturnian insectoid organism “woo;” their experience peaks at a certain point, and a loud buzzing sound begins. After the sound subsides, a life review usually occurs wherein they are given visual tableaux and/or narratives about their lives, particularly as they per-

201 tain to their blood relations and ancestors, to date. The first person narrator, Malochi, refers here to the commonality of this experience:

In the circle afterwards, we passed around a moon rock as a conch. All of the reports were strikingly similar. Each of us had heard a loud, continuous buzzing sound and had witnessed or re-experienced — as if from the perspective of a fly on a wall — traumatic events from early childhood, and as well the complex interplay of our relations. In seeing it all in this way, we could step outside of judgment or reactive emotion and instead hold that part of ourselves which was in pain, in a kind of cocoon of compassion. (Braunstein 23)

Another character, Malochi’s close friend, Park Hive, also speaks to a moment in her experience, evidencing here traces of the trickster:

In the turbulence of the woo, I kept trying to focus on the Yin and Yang symbol in my imagination. But all I could see was the black and the white sections as two separate entities. In my anxiety I was forgetting to create the small droplet of each within its opposite. Then a little trickster clown, dressed in black and white, broke through my wrongly constructed Yin and Yang symbol, as though it was a footballer running through a banner at the beginning of a game. It split the two shades, rolled them up and turned them into balls, which it juggled in my face. (Braunstein 25)

Regardless of the visual and audio phenomena that they encounter, and possibly because of something else far beyond what the mind can represent, the characters in Braunstein’s I Am The Woo generally emerge from the woo process transformed, with a more empowered outlook, more capable of thriving in the late stages of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. They have a renewed capacity to be connected with fellow beings; to extinguish personal and transpersonal demons or de- monic behaviour in others; and to usher in the new Chthuluscene, as imagined by Donna Haraway, which “entangles myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages — including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as- humus” (160). Malochi’s post-woo experience reveals parallels with Haraway’s post-human vision: 202 The woo helped me feel safe in my body and to also see that I was a child of the earth and of the multiverse, a true individual. Not an individualist, but individual in its truest sense: indivisible and interconnected. (Braunstein 12)

The insectoid buzzing sound heard by all initiates is never framed by Asquif and Otterson, however, Malochi considers it intrinsic to the metamorphosis she experiences from imbibing the organism. She senses there is a collective thought-form or “egregore” guiding the cult which is by its nature insectoid:

Without words, we gave each other ideas and mental pictures all the time. It was sometimes difficult to know where the thought forms originated. Even outside of ritual space, just spending time together in a house, I would have an idea to move from one room to another, to make a cup of tea or draw a picture and I would always find several others having the exact same idea at the exact same time. We would all swarm together around the kettle or simultaneously dance a silly jig, like one of those cheesy flash mobs from the last century, but not choreographed; it was totally spontaneous, which was unnerving and comforting at the same time. (Braunstein 7)

Malochi’s theory about the insectoid collectivity becomes troubled, however, when after imbibing the woo for the fifth time in a ritual, she feels she can no longer ignore something she has actually known deeply all along: that Asquif places himself outside and above the collective; he is only subject to the insectoid egregore when it suits him to be. When outside the collective and trying to control cult members, he waits until they are most vulnerable, then uses hypnotic/grooming techniques to tempt and manipulate them into doing his bidding. This provides an ideal segue to the next topic of exploration in I Am The Woo: trickster. Here Malochi expresses her painful realisation that she has been manipulated by her teacher, Asquif, for his own benefit:

In private Asquif told me, “I am the woo now and you are too. And so, at the stage you are at, it’s best to rest in silence. Drop your radio show and let your silence speak volumes about your evolution. What your ego wants 203 doesn’t really matter now. It’s what the woo wants, and you are the woo now, remember this. You can apprentice with me, but remember, ‘shhhhh.’” At this, he held his finger to his lips as though he was some kind of Hermet- ic mage. I must have been so bamboozled by the way he modulated his speech, the way he’d pause at certain junctures, hypnotically, that I acquiesced and closed down my radio show, believing I could help more people in the world by being his apprentice. I didn’t realise at the time that he was giving an identical speech to all members of the group, manipulating us all momentarily to step out of the egregore, but with no intention of ever offering us enough knowledge or experience to practice autonomously. It was all a lie. He was the Tempter. (Braunstein 44)

In some ways, there are similarities between I Am The Woo’s Asquif and Order of Our Lady Cicada’s Kyoko, as the latter is also a trickster leader of sorts; however, she does not step out of the Order’s egregore to feed her own personal needs. All that she does is in line with the Order’s mission for people to become their insect selves. Her trickery is purer than Asquif’s more deeply decep- tive variety, as metamorphosis is the only thing she ever dangles before Malochi. She never offers anything that she has no intention of making possible for Magda. Asquif, in I Am The Woo, however, is only motivated to silence and control Malochi by undermining her authority over herself and her own voice, in order to protect his own interests. In this sense, Kyoko, in Order of Our Lady Ci- cada, is more like the character Otterson in I Am The Woo, who is far quieter than the verbose Asquif, more immanent in his practice and plays a very steady role in supporting individuals in the group for much of the story. Otterson is neither dogmatic nor tricky, but rather is an agent of neu- trality and the holding of safe metamorphic space. He advises, but never enforces, that members of the cult ought to work at building their own embodied source of energy and not rely too heavily on the woo. Otterson’s corporeal intelligence is very different from Asquif’s Cartesian obsession with transcending the mind and the ego. Ironically, for all Asquif’s insistence that cult members dissolve their egos and, as a latter concession, enslave their egos to the divine, he seems to be the character who most trickily attempts to make the divine serve his ego rather than the other way around. I do not necessarily problematise the act of making the divine serve aspects of the ego. It is rather Asquif’s opacity around it and pretence at surrendering his ego which is problematic. At several times in the novel Malochi even suggests to Asquif half in jest, that he is a trickster. He denies it and deflects, finding new ways to subtly pathologise and undermine Malochi, manipulating her to 204 think that her distrust reveals deep emotional issues that are a sign she needs to pay him more money to let her consume more woo. Kyoko, on the other hand, while not perfect, never attempts anything of this nature upon me, and does not seem to need to. However, it is beyond the aims of this reading to speculate as to why each character’s tricks are so vastly different from one another. The reasons could be complex and manifold and thus the subject of a future paper. It is also outside the scope to explore in great depth intersections of hierarchy, race and gender in the story, despite this being another worthwhile area of inquiry. Returning to trickster, another trace of it in Braunstein’s I Am The Woo, is Asquif’s accidental discovery of the woo’s power. With no spiritual discipline or striving, simply imbibing the organism enables him and those on earth to whom he sells it, to “gatecrash the divine” (Braunstein 38). In Braunstein’s novella, 2105 is a time on earth where “people everywhere are turning to spirituality” (5). In this, Asquif sees a business opportunity. A convicted felon on the Saturn space station, he eavesdrops on his parents, renowned interplanetary biologists and psychedelic scientists, discussing the transformative but under-researched properties of Saturnalias gnostica — the woo. Following this, Asquif borrows money for an eyeball transplant in order to beat border retina scans, steals ten kilograms of woo and smuggles it onto earth. This is one of Asquif’s most compelling and complex acts of trickery, recalling Prometheus. He transgresses planetary boundaries, at once liber- ating people from their pain and also cementing his own position as venerable leader of the group. However, the dissolution of ego among the group and the insectoid collective mind/sharing of thought-forms becomes his downfall. We see this when a cascade of confrontations and accusations occur, reminiscent of the #metoo momentum in 2017 — “a movement against sexual harassment and sexual assault” (Me Too Movement). This cascade catalyses the dissolution of the operation in its patriarchal, hierarchical form. Eventually, true to many trickster parables, Asquif is disciplined — in this case for identity fraud — and is deported to the Saturn space station. Further on traces of tricksters in the novella, I would argue that Braunstein has written the woo cult as a collective of tricksters, or a trickster community. They practice underground, due to the illegality on earth of substances from other planets. Their version of community and collective ceremonial work challenges many of the mainstream practices of the society that they are in, which is largely made up of individuals seeking enlightenment through experiences which are highly atomised. Further examples beside the snake circle ritual mentioned above are one-on-one Skype “satsangs” with “certified” gurus, “Virtual Vipassna” (“individual pod-based shutting up cere-

205 monies” [44],28) and tantric sex rituals with artificially intelligent surrogates. Indeed, as distinct from the mainstream individualised and mostly sanitised spiritual experiences that are occurring in 2105, in the woo cult, the group members lie closely and sweatily together in a small room, purging into buckets only centimetres away from each other and taking turns to defecate in a single toilet. According to Bassil-Morozow on the trickster, he/it:

…has not yet reached the stage where he feels the need to hide his bodily processes from others, therefore he freely burps, farts, belches, hiccups, defecates, urinates and vomits. Obviously, trickster narratives are not all the same and some tricksters (depending on how conscious they are of their actions) do not perceive the split between the mind and the body, the civilised “niceness” and the uncontrollable, stubborn flesh. But generally, the trickster is at one with the world, and at peace with his body — even when his body produces “dirty” and “smelly substances.” (44)

The woo cult’s embodied intimacy also contains this unconditional embrace of the flesh. If tricksters are the patron saints of anything, it is metamorphosis, and such themes are present throughout I Am The Woo. Early in the text, Braunstein writes of Malochi’s atomised existence and poly-addictive issues. Her radio show, whereon she interviews subterranean activists and culture-makers, is an avenue for her expression and is the only part of her life which she does not find painful or dreary. Her less healthy outlet is numbing her pain and attempting to avoid her nightmares by vaping a pharmaceutical stimulant and playing a virtual reality video game called LIFE/DEATH/AFTER, which, true to its name, is a life, death and after life simulation. She is invited to a woo initiation by a friend, and the experience gives her a sense of hope and of embodied connection that she has been deeply longing for. After her first ceremony, she finds she no longer needs her pharmaceutical or gaming addictions to distract her from her pain. She is grateful to Asquif and invites him to be on her radio show as part of a special episode on underground initiatory groups. He agrees to be interviewed, but soon after its airing, he pressures her to quit her show entirely. The other cult members share similar experiences of embodiment through their encounters with the woo and are subsequently pressured by Asquif to quit other things that are important to them, to “de-identify” with the activities in their lives which have, according to him, been “products

28 Attribution for the term “shutting up ceremonies” goes to Sydney artist Neil McCann, aka Pipe. By this, he refers to ceremonies conducted in silence. 206 of their egos” (39). It becomes clear to Malochi that Asquif is looking at each member as an instru- ment to advance the mission of the cult, with the underlying aim of affirming his position at its apex. He seems particularly nervous about, and threatened by, members who contribute intelligently and keenly to public discourse. By self-transcendentalising, Asquif perpetuates the over-dominance of the western disembodied construction of mind, tricking even himself that he has “become”. I read Braunstein’s work here as a mirror to hierarchical and patriarchal structures that are often re- produced even in supposedly subversive contexts. Despite this, it is difficult not to feel compassion for the unexpected metamorphosis that be- falls the strange cult in I Am The Woo, just as it was also difficult to tear my eyes away from its wreckage. Admittedly, I read Asquif’s trajectory with a degree of schadenfreude and a sense of justice renewed. Perhaps with more levity than I had as a reader, Braunstein details a “tough-love insectoid-trickster intelligence” (101) expressed by the woo itself, which plays a hand in the cult’s, and particularly Asquif’s, demise. Whilst Asquif besmirches and undermines his dissenters, blaming them for destroying all he has supposedly worked for, in the end it is plain that the cult’s collapse has been of great benefit to its former members. It inspires them to live immanently in the world and without depending on the constant supply of energy that the woo supplies. It also breaks their unwholesome dependence on Asquif himself yet leaves them with their own intelligence which they have accessed through their contact with the woo and the knowledge that it is truly time for them to live their metamorphoses immanently; to actualise and embody them, beyond representation and beyond displacing their power outside of themselves. In this sense, there is a subtle yet profound similarity to Order of Lady Cicada; Kyoko is insistent that I have a fifty percent chance of transforming, and although I never gained any clarification about what she meant, I read this now as meaning that it was equally up to me as it was to the process to transform my experience. As an extension, it is about how metamorphosis lives immanently through me and through all of my relations in the mundane everyday life, rather than as a transcendent/metaphoric concept or parable, or as bound up with any external authority’s need for my worship. Needless to say, while living metamorphosis immanently is not about symbols and parables, it is not about “shutting up” either, as Asquif told Malochi it was. Following the breaking apart of the woo cult, at first Malochi fields violent threats and hexes from Asquif from his isolation cell on the Saturn space station, demanding that she relinquish her dissent to his practices and her support of his main dissenter, Otterson. If Malochi or the reader need any further confirmation of the problematic nature of Asquif, at this juncture in Braunstein’s novella it becomes undeniable. When things quieten down, Malochi reinstates her radio show and expands her praxis to involve creative 207 and underground non-hierarchical shamanic collaborations with others. As mentioned above, Braunstein writes her as living into a Chthuluscene (160) reality of post-human connectedness and refuge from the barbarism of late capitalism. From here, Malochi looks back with compassion for herself and the other former cult members, for allowing themselves to be seduced by the sense of belonging that the woo cult offered and by the tricks of temptation by Asquif. She feels no superior- ity to him, only to her former self, for her deepest metamorphosis really begins when she sees what trickery has occurred in the woo’s name, and she remains unwaveringly on her path, despite it. Braunstein’s I Am The Woo is a textured portrait of the human-becoming condition. Its medi- tations on immanence have helped inform my decision, as an insect-human, to develop my own writing in the context of rhizomatic, ficto-critical, practice-based research. Doing so opens an opportunity for me to explore the overlapping zone between theory and practice and also between the transcendent and the immanent. It is also fertilises the ground beneath which I walk, as I traverse the processes of my metamorphoses — even if I do this abstrusely and trickily. That is not to say that this paper is any way a final word on tricksters, insects and metamorphoses in Braunstein’s I Am The Woo. It is simply a series of nodes on the extant rhizomes of each topic and where they cross over. One such node in my own personal process is the impulse to work in more embodied ways with other hybrid beings, in lines of flight even further from the primacy of the text. Rethinking Hakim Bey’s “ontological anarchism,” I envision temporary sacred zones, never boundary-less, (for certain boundaries are inalienable), but always autonomous and decolonising. Taking inspiration from my experiences in Japan and from Braunstein’s research (including I Am The Woo), I can imagine continuing to work with insect-humans like Kyoko, Michiko, Daisuke and Tomas, with plant and animal spirits and with other creative interventions, in a collective style structure — a genuinely mutualist/anarchist approach to metamorphoses — rather than reproducing the patriarchal models that make this decolonising work necessary. I will conclude this essay with a provocation to Michelle Braunstein to one day write less enigmatically about that which informs her practice, knowing that at this point in time, she is intensely yet productively guarded about her personal life. Indeed, it seems ficto-criticism has given her an opportunity to write on a subject that is close to her heart, still trickily and immanently unfolding at the time of writing, ever insectoid, ever metamorphic.

208 (non)conclusion..

“Now to sum it up,” said Bernard. “Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we do not know each other (though I met you once I think, on board a ship going to Africa), we can talk freely. The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it were possible, I would hand it you entire. I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes. I would say, “Take it. This is my life.” ― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Earth is a protected wildlife refuge. See, we’re using it to replenish the mosquito population, which I remind you is an endangered species. — Pleakley, Lilo and Stitch

This doctoral dissertation has comprised my novella, Order of Our Lady Cicada, and an exegesis, “Mapping (non)representations of metamorphoses, tricksters and insects through seven stories.” The creative writing component is a literary artefact and a project of research in itself. The exegesis is a further construction of new knowledge, addressing the novella among six other literary texts. Together, both pieces address the question, how might post-humanist/New Materialist theories and creative praxis work with (non)representations of insects, tricksters and metamorphoses as processes for “becoming”? Order of Our Lady Cicada is about a person called Magda who feels she needs to change. Drained from nightly attacks by an insectoid being, she meets Kyoko who takes her away to an island of Japan with a promise that she will transform, the only catch being that she must also work at it. Magda then undergoes a pilgrimage whereon she makes some new friends and otherworldly ac- quaintances and contends with feelings of Otherness, intimacy, trust and betrayal. Following an accident and a recovery period she participates in another initiation, this time to a magical order. Dur- ing the latter she meet her trickster insect self, head on. Throughout the novella, Magda journeys with a sense of beauty, terror, tricky strangeness and at times, great discomfort, as she feels and faces difficult thought-forms and feelings. The story is an attempted intervention to humanist 209 metaphor, engaging the themes of tricksters, insects and metamorphoses as concretely as I could manage in order to leave its interpretation as open as possible. I have also treated it as a metamorphic work in itself; the act of writing it has been part of a process of becoming. In the exegesis I traced (non)representations of metamorphoses, tricksters and insects and their interplay through seven texts, including my own works of fiction and ficto-criticism as central components of the knowledge construction process. In deliberately keeping the discussion open, I have attempted to fulfil an intention to explore the issues therein; to examine multiplicities non- teleologically rather than to form a closed kind of conclusion. In support of this aim, in the first chapter, the literature review, I looked at texts by Rosi Braidotti, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Claire Colebrook, Kari Weil and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht on animals/insects: (non)representations and metamorphoses/becomings. My exploration in the literature review problematised the transcendentalising of humanist, disembodied thought and the metaphorisation of “the animal” through the human/animal binary, provoking a pursuit to more corporeal ways of knowing. In it, I also explored literature which supports my project’s focus on insects as a reframing tactic, aimed at subverting the privileging of certain species. Following this, in the literature review I looked at the ideas of Carl Jung, Jean Knox and Lewis Hyde among others, on the trickster figure. Through their ideas, I explored tricksters as emergent beings of paradox, chaos, order, metamorphoses, while always maintaining a critical view of the figure as archetypal or universal. Chapter two explored my methodology, and in this I canvassed the processes I engaged for knowledge construction which are “agnostic” research, rhizomatic research, phenomenological research, ficto-critical research and lastly, voice hearing, to carry out both my artistic practice and the exegetical research component of this project. Here I referred mainly to knowledge constructed by Jennifer Webb, Donna Lee Brien, Bryan Clarke, Jim Parsons, Linda Finlay, Stephen Muecke, Heather Kerr and Hearing the Voice at Durham University. In chapter three, The Beetle’s Hum, informed broadly by post-humanist theory, and more specifically New Materialism and critical animal studies, I conducted a close reading of Franz Kaf- ka’s Metamorphosis and Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild. In chapter four, I heard a Fly buzz — when I died, I address“The Fly” inter-texts: George Langelaan’s short story, Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film version and David Cronenberg’s 1986 film version. Through these texts, I again problematised humanism and metaphor as ways of knowing, exploring the possibilities of more corporeal experiences of trickster insects and metamorphoses in texts. 210 In the final chapter, Two Bloods, I conducted a reading of my novella, Order of Our Lady Cicada, and presented Magda Levy’s (the protagonist from the novella) inter/trans-textual reading of I Am The Woo, a text (un)written by me. The confluence of my growing interest in embodiment and tricksters (after conducting my honours research on the latter), with Magda’s voice beginning to speak to me about insectoid tricksters and metamorphoses, initially inspired me to conduct readings of all of the above texts with these topics in mind. While my discussions have attempted some degree of linearity in tracing the topics in the texts, they also cross-reference one another, in places springing back and forth and even spiralling, thereby deterritorialising the hierarchical structure of the canonical humanities doctoral project and invoking the Hermes (the trickster) in Hermeneutics. In my attempt at reading all texts as immanently as possible, I have sought to explore that which corporeally expresses each of the themes of trickster, metamorphoses and insects, generally leaving extrapolations of high symbolism and meaning for other theorists. As such, I offer no easily swallowed capsules of meaning or conclusion. I simply reaffirm here the project’s aim to unsettle the search for transcendent meaning in texts and to provoke a comparatively immanent, corporeal relation with knowledge through the themes of tricksters, insects and metamorphoses. In terms of further areas of study which could extend from this project, I feel it would be valuable to spend more time with notions of (non)representation, the actual and the virtual, and how this may relate to the post-human, especially notions of non-human desire/agency and the realm of the non-human post-secular: ancestors, plant and animal spirits. Further, it would be worthwhile developing the virtual/phantom text, I Am The Woo into an actual text and a ficto-critical exegesis as a potential method in my exploration of it. Other enduring questions provoked by the process of this research are around insects and consciousness, further challenging the notion of human consciousness as unique. I am also interested in the project of problematising consciousness itself and would like to interpolate with practice-based research, remixing and developing extant discourse from within the areas of New Materialism and critical animal studies.

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