First person
One of the hardest things about the process of grief is the way in which it repurposes your memories. Like the discovery of an affair, it orientates everything it touches: past, present, future. The first time Harriet and I speak by Zoom, she talks about the pain of recalling almost anything from the past two decades. “Even the happy memories are painful. Because it’s all being re-remembered.” Hello Harriet: how the pandemic has led me back to an old friend, and to my young self
Somewhere around the start of lockdown 2.0, the pain that had been circling since March began to gnaw at the base of my spine. Not a new sensation but more insistent and at times fierce. Unable to swim or visit my osteopath or rely on my usual defences or distractions, I was forced to turn inwards. What I learnt in lockdown, The Age
One afternoon in late July 2003 I turned up at a café in Brunswick Street Fitzroy to have coffee with a man. I carried, for reasons still partly obscure to me, a small orange case – a child's reinforced cardboard 1950s school bag – and arrived several minutes late. – Assemble at home, Griffith Review
I am in a small tent somewhere on the southern New South Wales coast. It is night, and beyond the pitched nylon skin is – or must have been – the scrape of eucalypts and the push-pull of the ocean, wind, moon, stars etc. I don't remember. What comes instead, when I reconfigure this particular memory, is the sound of sex. – The summer I didn't kiss Mal, The Age
Driving through a public car park one afternoon nearly 10 years ago, I saw a car pull out suddenly in front of me and I slammed on my brakes. There was a brief silence, during which I bit down on the expletive that had made it almost to my lips, then from behind me a small, clear voice said, "Cheeses Christ!" – My precious burden, The Age/ Sydney Morning Herald
We are drifting. Sideways. In a small boat down a large river. I am in the rear, supposedly steering and he is in the front yelling, "Left, left!" Or "Right, right!" I'm yelling back: "Which would you actually prefer?" And: "If you're not actually going to use your paddle, at least don't leave it dragging in the water." Stuff like that. – Holidays from hell: close encounters with hippos, The Age
Jimmy Savile loves me. So does Bill Oddie. At least he used to - these days it is harder to tell. – Signature pieces, The Age/ Sydney Morning Herald
Poem: Caritas Christi
third person
MARCH 2020. IN a darkened room in a Melbourne hospital, a slight, dark-haired woman sits at the bedside of a lone patient. Outside, COVID-19 webs its way silently through the city; inside, the patient rests back on the day bed, eyes covered with a soft eye mask, ears enclosed in noise-cancelling headphones through which a specially curated playlist will rise and fall over the next six hours or so. – Love and Fear: Towards an Australian model of psychedelic mental health, Griffith Review
Tap–tap–tap. Felicity Baker knocks her fingers on the table; an insistent percussive beat. It could get annoying. We are in an otherwise tranquil room at the Southbank home of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, where Professor Baker (small, intent, energetic) is head of music therapy. It is a field whose previous lack of recognition was once a source of frustration to her. But that is not why she’s tapping. – We’ll meet again, The Monthly
I was well into the book before it fully sunk in that, while the focus is on abortion, the fundamental concern is with choice. Specifically, who gets to make that choice when it comes to women’s wombs: the bearers of those wombs or the society within which those wombs bleed and/or breed? – The desperate, secretive drama: ‘Choice Words’, edited by Louise Swinn, The Monthly
It began not with a sound but with pressure. A great pulse or force that pushed him backwards away from the oven and into the kitchen bench. All around him he could see flying fragments “like little mini jets or something whirling past my ears.” – When sound becomes pain, The Monthly
"We think of our bodies, including our brains, as a kind of machine that needs to be tinkered with or have parts replaced, rather than a really interesting finely tuned instrument that can manage itself in ways that we don’t give it credit for." – Patients have more power than they think, even when unconscious, Globe and Mail
Two weeks before his death in August 2015, Oliver Sacks outlined the contents of The River of Consciousness, the last book he would oversee, and charged the three of us with arranging its publication.” So begins the foreword to the acclaimed neurologist’s most recent book. – The shape of a generous mind, The Monthly (PDF version)
Each day, specialist doctors known as anaesthetists put hundreds of thousands of people into chemical comas to enable other doctors to enter and alter our insides. Then they bring us back again. It is mind-blowing. But quite how this daily extinction happens and un-happens remains uncertain. – (edited extract Anaesthesia: the gift of oblivion and the mystery of consciousness) Sydney Morning Herald/ Good Weekend
Paste-up art by Phoenix the Street Artist found under a bridge on the old Kodak estate, Coburg
Caritas Christi
My mother has fallen
from a plane. She is
tumbling
slow
hieroglyph
meaning
over
meaning
over
meaning
we cannot tell what
she is saying. Her body sends
stray signals
she says I was in Darwin buying drugs
she says (waking)
I was on a train
my mother was born in a carriage
she says
my mouth
is so dry
By Kate Cole-Adams