Visual Diary #17

Style Queen, Dream House/House Dream. Miss Jean Brodie and all kinds of Prime

Style queen at the St Kilda Road tramstop at twilight, wearing pink satin everything, hair down to her elbows. No phone or vape. No palanquin. Seen by me, driving home with a bag of ill-advised fete finds: a mobster mother-of-the-bride twinset, a muu-muu of painted birds and flowers, glittery shoes, army pants.

A dreamy house at the very edge of Hampton with garden overrun with echium.

A house from a dream that was hidden in dunes, uninhabited, with no roof and shiny white walls like the inside of a shell. I was happy to have found it, felt perfectly safe there and was planning to stay a while.

Frome Bachelard’s Poetics of Space:

“Moreover, these facts of the imagination are related to allegories of very ancient origin. Jurgis Baltrusaitis recalls (bc. cit. p. 57) that “as late as the Carolingian epoch, burial grounds often contained snail shells as an allegory of a grave in which man will awaken.” And in Le bestiaire du Christ, p. 922, Charbonneaux-Lassay writes: “Taken as a whole, with both its hard covering and its sentient organism, the shell, for the Ancients, was the symbol of the human being in its entirety, body and soul. In fact, ancient symbolics used the shell as a symbol for the human body, which encloses the soul in an outside envelope, while the soul quickens the entire being, represented by the organism of the mollusk. Thus, they said, the body becomes lifeless when the soul has left it, in the same way that the shell becomes incapable of moving when it is separated from the part that gives it life.”

“One’s prime is the moment one is born for. You little girls must be on the alert to recognize your prime, at whatever time it may occur, and live it to the full.”

This is Miss Jean Brodie in her prime. I watched the movie (magnificent Maggie Smith) and read the book (a lovely Penguin paperback with a movie tie-in cover of Jean and her gels (the crème de la crème) picnicking.) The book packs so much into 162 pages - is dark and funny - moves back and forth through time - tosses up Calvanism, Catholicism, facism, adolescence and influence. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to read it. Muriel Spark was a poet, and queen of brilliant titles (Girls of Slender Means, The Ballad of Peckham Rye) - I listened to this excellent podcast which revealed quite a bit of Scottish history/culture for me.

This got me thinking about my prime, and society and frameworks and invisibility and usefulness. This week I also read this article “Too old to get a job, too young to retire: the French women over 50 stuck in limbo.” Like a lot of creatives I have bits of work here and there that almost adds up to a wage. I’m always looking at a straght comms jobs on Seek, or part-time library work, or something that might feel more secure, but I think probably that ship has sailed.

I had another dream recently where I had accidentally almost thrown out all the work that has got me to here: old poetry, old screenplays, proofs of past failures and success. I am taking the dream as a reminder to keep on doing what feels right, even if it’s out of step with what looks right. Who decides all this anyway?

This week I happened to go out - out! -to an event called Generation Women, in Brunswick, a monthly women’s storytelling night. A ‘representative from the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s tells a story on a theme. This one was ‘The Tipping Point’. I went to see the fabulous Balli Kaur Jaswal presenting for Team 40’s, and came home with a headfull of OWE (other womens experiences). Note, I was there with my mum, who could tell her own stories, but she’s Team 80s. She’s off the charts.

Because my computer knows everything I’m doing, I was pointed to Signora Rosa, the 68y y-o German woman (suspiciously photogenic) who sold her house, moved to an agricultural community full of young folk, shared her preserving skills making ‘resilience jam’ and has now become an influencer: “One day I looked out the window and said to myself: - “Rosa, your life can’t end under a beige awning.” She could be a bot - this is part of the problem of living in the modern world. We never stop wanting representations of ways we could be living that might feel right. Capitalism never stops finding ways to exploit that. But we can be select with our attention, and our wallets, and support things that feed our rich inner lives.

Lastly, I want to recommend you check out my excellent RMIT colleague Rachel Matthews & Trish Bolton talking with Tony Birch at the Tin Pot Cafe as part of their ‘Menopause is not a Use-By Date’ cavalcade of hot flush zero fucks enlightenment.