Not quite see-through, but cradling a sea-change, feeling it curve and wind around oneself; it is both liberating and unnerving. Perhaps it is the season’s change, but the ontological and ontical properties of things transfix me again.

I spent the afternoon and evening at the botanical gardens, photographing flowers and branches, being amused by other photographers, the amateurs, the serious and professionals, and the tourists. Not entirely sure where I fit within the continuum. Probably the artwankery type of serious amateur. Does it matter anymore? For me it’s about allowing myself to be enchanted, allowing myself to play with a battered camera even if most of its processes still remain a mystery to me.

I’ve also re-drafted I Will Not Save Your Damned Princess! at the river. I started drafting this sometime in 2006, and had plans to set it in Japan, from the P-O-V of a grumpy asian photographer chick. That hasn’t changed! However, I write differently these days. Perhaps it’s because of mixing with performance studies people. Perhaps it’s the stuff I’ve read concerning performance studies, or if it’s just the fact that I am engaging with life and the physical qualities of existence more now; I always visit places where I want to write things. I enact scenes, I mark “X” on the ground in my head; I traipse through gardens or parks or the dark corners of concert halls and rock clubs. The scenes are grand and ornate; they spool as though they’ve got a director and a stage manager on hand. I’ve re-set I Will Not Save Your Damned Princess! inevitably enough, in Brisbane, though it begins in Japan. And so, because it was part and parcel of the seachange I am experiencing which mixes gothic literary theory with mad fiction-writing, even madder art adventures, photography and a return to philosophy, all of this has made it into the short story. I’m happy about this.

Don’t know how to feel about being so translucent, though…

T.S. Eliot is still in everything for me; lines from poems float in my head. I have a looming deadline and an assignment near-crisis. Or else, or else, I would dare disturb the universe. I would be writing extravagant poetry, dancing to Sufi music or painting amorous mermen with glistening scales and irisdescent tails and fins. I would be out stalking silent gloaming moments with my camera. I would be flying, even if my insides are a prufrockian jello, treading the fine line between inspiration and timorousness.

Instead, I take a bunch of photos from a series I did last year but did not do anything with because the photos were flawed, even if the composition was decent. My lens had been newly ruined from a steampunk costume adventure, and the ducks were too fast in the gloaming light. So I decided to be a little more adventurous with filters and rendered clouds and difference with a judicious stylus.

I decided to do some more crazy things with photomanipulation and another of T.S. Eliot’s poems. “Little Gidding” from The Four Quartets. I quite like the idea of these ducks quoting T.S. Eliot to each other as they glide in synchronous grace on a darkening, algae-saturated lake.

As it must for watermaidens everywhere.

I commented to someone once that “T.S. Eliot is in EVERYTHING!” and some days, I really do feel that way.

Dreaming of blue skies, fluffy clouds and the lapping of water, now that it is cold and dark.

Water therapy, and a resurgence of vertiginous certainty.

I’ve always thought pelicans have the most expressive expressions on their avian faces.