GARGOYLE
My invitation to write this text came from my dear friend Jess Milne. Jess’s trust in others to responsively and energetically understand what she means when she says something like “Miriam Margolyes horny swampy attitude,” and in the idea that they are already metabolising something like this in their own minds and practices — not to mention the frisson I feel in reading those exact words for the first time — is compelling for me. A-learning-to-poo-for-the-first-time combination of fear and exhilaration. Deep down, low and ordinary, but everything. We watch videos of animals shitting, the snake and the crocodile are the most alarming, wonderful. Learning to do things you can and are already doing — now with consciousness, presence. Eat, Pray, Poo. I think it’s the same as what Nuar Alsadir in Animal Joy has described as “the sap, the juice, the eroticism that is in everything and that makes for life and interest that keeps us awake and alive”.
What follows is a result of how I metabolise this and the many other references and works that make up Gargoyle. I do this through a filter not only of physical distance, (I am living on Kaurna land), but through the ins and outs of my own actions and interactions — inside and outside my house and my garden, watching tv, running the airconditioner, cooking dinners, running the sprinkler, living with my family and sleeping with noisy crickets by my head through the days of a late summer heatwave.
The ordinariness of this filter is important in the end, because it occurs to me we’re all working with the same raw ingredients; making do and making work and making space with what’s available to us when we work with anything and how we do that means a lot and makes a difference. Gardens and homes are fundamental reflections of how we manage ourselves and our boundaries in relation to the greater wonderful chaos.
Throughout this heatwave my house was serenaded all night long by crickets at a decibel I didn’t know was possible. I stood at night in the window trying to listen into a certain direction of the garden but couldn’t locate them. Then, on the hottest night — a night when the waning heat turned and started rising again at midnight, it became apparent that the high chiiirping ring was coming from inside a wall in the bathroom and not the garden at all. It was disquieting to find not many crickets but a single cricket, attempting to dig or tunnel or chew its way out of an interior wall, so close to where we slept. It had gotten louder, almost deafeningly shrill!
I have always enjoyed the sounds of crickets and cicadas thronging away through summer nights, and besides something about the dark swampy heat and the stillness, it made it feel appropriate to lie awake and listen to it rather than attempt to excavate it. Besides — how? We could only let it do its thing. When I googled it later, the first thing I read declared that a cricket’s arrival is a good omen and to kill a cricket in your home is to bring misfortune upon your household. I was relieved that we had chosen to lean into the ominousness of its slow and strange entrance overnight. By the early morning it was emerging fully, reversing out of the wall back legs and wing tips first.
I left the moist, dark, soilly, balled remnants of its night moves where they were for a few days, to ponder every time I came into the bathroom. And now when I pee I find myself leaning forward to peer at the hole it’s left, 1cm in diameter at the base of the wall in a gap in the skirting board, and wonder if I’ll ever patch it up.
When I came to live here I’m not sure I’d ever seen a slater or a millipede. If I had, it was only the force of their abundance here that have since cemented them into my consciousness. Seemingly every time I opened a door several coiled millipedes would fall about me and I’d find slaters rolled up in the crease where the carpet meets the walls and the window sills overflowing with both. Just last month I even bit into a millipede that had crawled into a bamboo straw in a drawer.
This week I learnt that Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse was published on the provision that she turn an earwig into a beetle and a centipede into a beautiful butterfly. She retained an original illustration of wood-lice living in a plate rack by referring to them only as “three creepy-crawly people”. Since biting into the millipede I've felt a shift in my body’s registration of the other creepy coily crawly ‘people’ in my house. A different peaceful acceptance of what we’re sharing. Everything would work better if we could turn the house inside out. The idea of it as a firm membrane between inside and outside lets us down. Conversely, I frequently feel let down by the porosity of my own inside/outside membrane and consider that it might be faulty. When I want it to feel like a superpower!
I watch a video of Laraaji’s Celestana. It’s right up my alley visually — in part because the lack of technological finesse with which the imagery is layered in roughly cut out stacked transparencies corresponds to an aesthetic preference borne out of a personal lack in technological imaging skills.
Finger chimes recall a delicate flowering shrub, like a potted fuchsia with bell-shaped flowers that I neglected to death in the heatwave. Vaseline lens-edged cut outs lie transparent over a still image of crashing waves. I start trying to layer inside me a sense-memory of places I have been and noticed the presence of windchimes with images of coastal gardens and silvery salt water and air-loving plants that predominate where I live — as though they were in the Laraaji video.
The word gargoyle comes from French and Latin words for throat or gullet and from words deriving from the root word gar — to swallow or gargle, and which represented the gurgling sound of water. Laraaji’s frog puppet (Mr Love or Mr Peace, I’m not sure which), singing it’s dirgy earthy throat song is actually what makes me think about a cricket burrowing out of my wall again. Both are haunting me, which I enjoy. When you see three tiger snakes in one week as you walk about the city you can’t help but wonder if it means something, if maybe co-star has something to say about it. (Did you know worm charming is a competitive sport in some places and cause for festival?)
Laraaji’s offering of ‘this moment’ as a definition for spirituality, his advocation of fostering AS-ness (i.e. being AS the quality of something else: AS-love or AS-light), and the idea that “healing means people moving around with a greater sense of peaceful connectedness to everything”, are the things that stay with me after I read more about him. But so does the space made by what he obviously prefers not to say. Whatever my spiritual beliefs, I also feel them swiftly weighed down by the limitations of language attempting to articulate what lives precisely beyond itself. It’s too awful to forcibly divorce spiritual experience from the inherent comedy of its live-action counterpart. The spiritual ideal is one thing but not the thing. The words are not the same as the voice singing them or the body from which they emerge, like the song from Laraaji’s frog.
@japanesethatchingguy, is a guy who makes traditional Japanese thatched roofs and whose extremely captivating Instagram account shares his practice of this work in hilarious and beautiful, joyous videos. I get the impression that he didn't always enjoy the work, that some of the conditions of his training were challenging and off-putting even. He maybe gave up for a time. But eventually, I imagine he opened up a shimmering rectangle within himself, or the work did it. A ‘shimmering rectangle’ is how Vivian Gornick described a certain state of feeling into doing (writing for her, but it works for roof thatching or ambient music making too), and the opening to an erotic dimension of doing-ness which my phone helpfully autocorrects in a techno freudian slip, to doing - mess!
@japanesethatchingguy, like Laraaji, embodies the way the absolutely silly, serious business of working and living coincides with the deeply spiritual perspective held within embodied humour of the clown. We wish into the updraft. Where are we going? I don’t know either. (Remember to wear your seatbelt. So you don’t fall over laughing.) — Haruo Nishio A.K.A @japanesethatchingguy
Find something you can do with love and fashion the tools to do it. Or maybe fashion the tools of your dreams and do something lovingly with them. Gardening is a great place to start. And I like to think that the way your mum, my mum and a million other mums and dads tour us round their gardens pointing out new plantings, plants that have been pulled out, offering tips on compost and rogue bees or wombats is a way of gesturing toward something, that ultimately one has to come to alone. But to be shown a space for finding it, by pointing out, is as generous and intimate and loving as it is simple. It also appeals to me as a mother, the opportunity and reminder to make space and not labour a point.
In 1969, The Source opened on the Sunset strip in Los Angeles. It was a health food store, salad cafe, a meeting patio for the stars, and the brain child of Father Yod, the launching pad of the Source Family Cult which would ultimately end… the way cults do. It’s a shame they didn't stick to salads: The Aladdin's Lamp: carrots, beets, raisins and alfalfa sprouts with herb dressing and garlic: $2.
The humble alfalfa sprout is a cultish, spiritual green. It was popular in the 70s, I remember it in the 90s, I have found it hard to get it lately and I know I’m not the only one. Yes! It has been selling out at woolies. Finding the right frequency to vibrate your transcendental spiritual awakened-ness on is important - alfalfa is a good place to start but it can get out of hand and sometimes even feels aggressive. I remember the earth plate lady at the farmers market would raise the plate as you reached for it, challenging you to accept it with a simultaneous lightness and centered grounding that she approved. I saw people ahead of me rattled, almost losing their plates over shoulders and was grateful to study the pass over from my place in the line before it was my turn to step up “AS-lightness,” able at least to affect what I might have felt was lacking on a deeper level. I needed those green goddess-drenched sprouts.
At the same time as the power and influence of The Source was waning (and speaking of salad dressing), another sauce family’s fortunes was rising: The Bragg family of apple cider vinegar fame. Their iconic matriarch in her pink cowgirl’s hat, festooned with fake flower wreaths and bushels, surrounded by Sedona crystals in her ranch style all american abode, proclaiming “I feel ageless!… Your health is your wealth! Yes yes yes! Bragg’s Apple Cider will do miracles for you, God Bless you!” As much as hers was a serious business, I like to think that Patricia Bragg had some appreciation for the art of the long-form clown AS way of life. And she was a purple auntie to some for sure, which brings me back to Miriam Margolyes once more — a professor sprout and a purple auntie of the highest order. A purple auntie? If you know, you know? But, in one sense, they’re an important being in the order of circuit breaking influencers who positively impact your life as well as disturbing what might have seemed like a natural order. And we all need a broader spectrum of relationships to make sense of the interior and exterior environments we necessarily traverse. We all need someone soft but very strong to teach us how to enjoy an onion, (whole like an apple but with a cheese preamble to prepare you) like Margolyes who doesn’t particularly like children but addresses the child in me. I need the friends who will show me how to put garlic in my socks when I’m sick and when to sleep with halved onions by my bed and will probably grow into purple aunties themselves.
There are divergent ideas about the meaning of gargoyles on religious structures such as catholic churches — some say that they were meant to illustrate evil and sin, their presence serving as a warning or threat. But they have also been interpreted as magically protective devices that repelled the very same. I like the idea of the gargoyle opening onto contrary meanings that it can never resolve. Like my cricket — at once protective and repellent.
Being turned in two directions at the same time, into the tension between what is comforting and familiar, or what feels light and joyous, and what is — on the other hand — unsettling and disquieting. The way pleasure might be found at the intersection of the two as much as at the ends of either side. The earthen taste of beetroot is what I most and least enjoy about it every time. I don’t want any of my positive feelings of connection and communion to be disconnected from their soiliness, or from the discomfort and comedy of finding and sharing them in turn.
It might just be the most beautiful thing to have your world rocked every day, ever so gently by something that you or someone else is already doing; manifesting the swampy, horny attitude of a purple auntie spirit guide — whatever this might mean to each of us — and with faith in what it means to others too. Somedays the whole world seems to be an onion. I’m not sad but I am moved and moved and moved. I try not to feel ashamed or self-conscious about it and sometimes some people make it much easier, but they also make me cry. So thank you, and now I need to go and water my garden or chop some onions.
Maggie Brink