What if I had been a monster? A monster like a film was: for instance, Dog Day Afternoon, which had a soundtrack, and actors, and lighting, and cuts, and dialogue, and yet, despite having so many parts, had pretended to be one thing, like a human did. All of their human parts were integrated; or if not, then, they were unwell. Kangaroos had appeared to be monsters to English settlers, or at least, the settlers had pretended so. A poet might have pretended anything, and the poem, rather than the pretence, had ultimately been the point. I had known little about the land of Victoria, despite having lived there half my life. Yet when I had read the contemporary writers of New South Wales, I had wondered sometimes if they had ventured beyond Paddington and the Sydney Opera House, the design of which was said to have foretold the coming of Norman, Farnham and Newton-John (and not what was known as the Push). Ok, boomer, the Hilda af Klimt show visitors, from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, had retorted, on hearing this: they had thrown stones at the speaker as if they were radical feminists, or ‘Jap girls in synthesis’, to have borrowed a phrase from Bowie, a bona fide boomer himself. I had known too little about Sydney, obviously, which had been my state of origin’s capital. But I had known what New South Wales grass had looked like, and the sound of New South Wales cows as they had eaten it, if they had, and it hadn’t been too dry or prickly, in which case it would then have been burnt, or pulled out, or scarified, or slashed. I had loved slashers, whereas only the inventor, or possibly the inventor’s mother could have loved a mower. We were not a blonde white family, but blondeness had re-emerged in the next generation. I hadn’t had a religious view of movies: I had no idea of an afterlife, or sequel, for them. If a movie was to be like sex (which was a monster in act form), then Georges Bataille might have suggested that we had needed a sacrifice. Sal had been the sacrifice of the long-deferred climax of Dog Day Afternoon. That, in a specific sense, was the suspense factor of the movie: not whether they would get away to ‘Algeria’ or not, but, rather, who – and how many – would have been sacrificed in the attempt. In the end, the sacrifice was economical, and not that of ritual slaughter, and not at all messy. In a sense it had made Dog Day Afternoon an early queer celebration, despite the apparent failure of Sonny’s project, and his relationship/marriage with Leon, but, again, a success, in the sense that neither had had to be sacrificed. In fact, Sal, the ultimate victim, was the straight man who had denied queerness explicitly. Yet to have said this was to have expressed interpretative trivia. [I have had to divert from this allegory of identity because I had had to deal with reports of rumours that I had talked with foxes as a child. Yet, upon investigation, it had seemed that the rumours were untrue, that no accusation had been made, and that no one who had not known me as a child knew anything about any relation between foxes and myself. It had probably been some kind of reaction to my therapist having remarked that I had a persecution complex. That had been his banal interpretation of my need to have been bitten during sex, I had thought, momentarily, but then I had reassured myself that I had not revealed that desire (or any, sexual desires) to him: a desire, by the way, that had been usually granted – and was the measure of passion – for if I, at a moment towards climax, had whispered, bite me, usually the other person would have done so; and if they hadn’t, then that was a sign that the sexual feeling was not, at that moment, at least, heightened enough, or that the combination of myself and them had been a chemistry mistake. A mistake a fox would not have made, I might have added. It was lucky, I had supposed, that I had stumbled upon, or had produced, perhaps, rather, this vital, fox-related, aspect of sexual fulfilment early on, and not later, when, although for all intents and purposes, I had abandoned my French Catholic background, I had become obsessed with Catholic martyrs, especially those who had been burned. If not, I would probably have been walking around with the scars of cigarette burns on my skin, like a veritable bride of Picasso. I might not have given up smoking, or would probably – for better, or worse – have had to target smokers as lovers – something that was still viable, especially among younger guys. It had amused me: the idea that I might dump someone because they had substituted smoking for vaping, and what use was vaping in bed, after all? In any case, better to have a cigarette stubbed out on my skin, than have a lighter or match put to it. Imagine being just about to come, and saying burn me, and them having to try to find their lighter, or having to try to make it work. Probably we would both have lost the moment if that had been the operational necessity. All that, which I had just written, was a preamble or, rather, momentary redirection, away from the time when my therapist, Dr Goon, a nice enough person, probably, for one out of ten patients, and three out of ten of his family members – but I was redirecting again – when Dr Goon had said I had a persecution complex I had secretly been pleased, and had silently corrected him with the term, Jeanne D’Arc complex: aloud it would only have confused him. While it might have seemed self-defeating to have kept so much from Dr Goon, I had found – from an informal survey – that such compartmentalising of personal information was not unusual among psychiatric patients. If, instead of embodying a film, I had been a director of a film, I suppose that I might have projected my own monstrosities onto the making of it, and therefore have deluded myself that my film was of a piece. Watching the rushes, like Sidney Lumet presumably had, wondering if he had picked the right moment to begin his robbery film, I might have had similar doubts, if Lumet had had any that is. There were no beginnings in a movie, really, the same as with a person. There may have been a legal definition of when a person began (and cultural variations on that), but there had been no precise, discernible, nor universal, moment. Perhaps, though, I was being too neutral in my definition of monsters, too lacking in sensationality. Perhaps I should have borrowed / learned from my time among the monstrous community of X, the sniping of radicalist shades (in various senses of the word). Yet an offhand comment on Facebook might be just as vicious. Foxes had sexually excited me, even as a child. I was torn metaphorically, while knowing I was risking a literal tearing. A risk that was complicated by my having been the designated carer of the chooks, or the chookherd, among us kids. Sadomasochism and its structures were everywhere in childhood, we didn’t have to wait to read a snivelling protagonist’s desires to be dominated by a flagellating woman in order to learn about them. Adulthood, was in this sense, a sensual regression, even if our physical capacities (including those of sensuality), were greater. I had known my thinking was confused on the subject, because I was thinking about it, and remembering my own mind, when I was young, while being in daily contact with domesticated and wild animals, and making an attempt at a comparison with my mind now, when I could barely hope to have communicated on some insignificant level with a naked human – if naked was the measure of animality. The point was, that I would enlarge small holes in the fence as if to tempt or allow foxes into the chookyard: and then lie outside in the dark as the hens’ hypocritical protector. I had once dropped dinner scraps in the grass as a way of luring foxes. It hadn’t worked. But in the day, I would often come across a fox in the paddocks or in the straggly bush beyond. Then I would sit and watch them. What were the memories of artworks but revenants, virtual Fragmentsteins. After seeing the movie Bird, I had Blur’s ‘The Universal’ in my head for days, and it was noticing that that had brought back to me the images of the movie. Our minds, once we had stopped thinking about tasks and problems, were image machines, stirring the pot of thoughts, sounds, and pictures. As I had woken, thinking about writing this story, and wondering about the sleep of movies, the temperature of movies, and hearing Damon Albarn’s voice supplemented by Barry Keoghan’s, an image of the Smiths’ Strangeways Here We Come album cover had floated into my thoughts, albeit somewhat more lime coloured than it had been in reality. The guy featured on the cover was actor Richard Davalos and in film at that moment he had been looking at James Dean in East of Eden. Despite the queer Hollywood supplement, both that album, and the film Bird, were glorious products of British working-class culture (as might also be said that Dog Day Afternoon had been for America). But instead of referring to obvious contenders like The Castle or Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, I will, rather, have noted Spit (the sequel to Gettin’ Square, while cartoonish – fuckatoonish if I may coin a term for an overswearing bird of a movie (Spit the character is a ratbag, yes, but why not a fuckatoo, too?)) – even thought I hadn’t quite felt like celebrating it – it had given us at least the reprisal of a great comic movement: Spit’s inspired running – one that had always been made in thongs. I had gotten up, I had begun, I was bits and pieces of film and song (and a Waller poem, and Mulvey’s feminist film criticism and a Hoffman story, and notes on Pound’s involvement in haiku), and dream. As that raggedy Kenneth (a reference to an assemblage dog that had been made by the Goodies in their eponymous TV show), I had approached the socials. I had not posted that I had fucked foxes. It was, I had affirmed, a line that I hadn’t crossed. Yet I had seemed to have arrived at the point where definitions of monster con- or diverged. Days were monsters; the earth was a monster. We who were products of the earth and of days were monsters (or, alternatively, monstrous products of time and space). If I had thought about fascism, I had been inclined to conclude that the proliferation of monsters was good, and that any limiting in favour of the pure was bad. Was a monster to be known by their being, or by their actions? The latter was convenient, and easy, because monstrous acts were already known to everyone. Monsters – a more popular term now than it had been since the early nineteenth century – when referring to (so-called) human monsters – were not the creatures of myth, who were more violent, I had hazarded, than sexual – but perhaps the sexual aspects of myth became suppressed over time, and the monsters of children’s stories remained delightfully violent, only. The sexual monster was human, and not necessarily violent, or at least not in the bloodthirsty sense, but only in the overpowering, abusive, non-consensual, or disapproved of, sense(s). Depending on a language, or ideology, community paradigm, the queer and / or trans were monstrous, and / or the rapists were monstrous, and the paedophiles were, perhaps, the most monstrous of all. (The necrophiliacs, the practitioners of bestiality, the sadomasochists, were for the most part consigned to the realm of the trivial joke, or of marginalised / repressed kink.) Identity and act had, then, remained inextricated. The pure might have been reconstructed not as the virgins, nor the devout, but the conventional, the normative. What these terms signified, or allowed for, were sites or lines of battle. Yet etymology had indicated something arguably more primitive – because the word monster was aligned with the word portent, and was derived from the Latin for warn. I had thought of the birth of a five-legged calf, that might have brought the people of the community it was born into towards prayer, reform, or sacrifice. Lyric poems had an analogous problem. Celan’s body of poetry was monstrous, in relation to what German lyric poetry had been before him (although he might have said that it was the German language itself – or possibly concrete poetry – that was monstrous). If it was a warning, it was a proud warning: that the pure German culture was over (albeit it had always been a lie). An historian that I had read (was it Huizinga?) had claimed that white Europeans had hated Jews because European culture was Jewish, and had not really been European at all. German culture – German poetics – despite the Holocaust – was more Jewish than ever, with Celan and other German Jewish poets having become paradigmatic. To trope was to monster, arguably, to make the word – the line – the poem – the page – unlike it had been before – to turn it. Change, then, was arguably a warning: but who had been giving the warning, and who or what had received it? I had been thinking of the purity of my poems, of their integral sameness, their flatness, perhaps. Yet the troping of the line and the poem were ever my practice. The point wasn’t that I could relax, that I could reassure myself that my poems were not fascist poems of complacency, but that the mode of troping had become, if not conventional, then arguably customary to myself [lying still as I was, in the foxy grass], and then that I would have to sink into nonbeing, nonpoetry, or have caught the (renewing) wave of the trope. The warning may have come from the recognition, that that was what a poem had become (in the terms of my own compositional practice), and that, therefore, it had run the risk of a kind of self-institutionalisation: to and for myself, I had meant. An alarmed reader might also have cried, that they had not consented to this kind of writing – with relation to my writing, or of a change in my writing – or towards another kind of writer or writing altogether. They had not expected, they might have protested, to have heard or read it. [Human sexuality must have remained separate from that of animals because an animal could not have consented. That sexuality – not to mention sex, or gender – was given, and should not be troped was a broader and more dangerous (dangerous to the daring troping humans) attitude. Whether ignorant (or careless) farmers in isolated nineteenth century America had wet their pencils in or had stuffed their orifices with, the parts, or even wholes, of cattle, sheep, horses and dogs or other creatures, were monsters, had become moot. We had known better.] Progress, human, progress, was, however, an outcome of troping. It had always been accompanied with a warning: and perhaps, the warning was don’t relax. But the projected misdirection that was being warned against might not have been what we had thought it was. Modernity’s (or revolution’s) cry might have been that new traps were better than old ones. Speech was continually troped, and writing had paid attention to that: and yet writing was more formalised; and it was speech that was monstrous: that was therefore mocked when it was that of a politician, or celeb, which was being recycled on social media; writing could not morph at the pace of speech; it had tended to gibber when it had tried; it was reading that writing was married to, that it was the delighted partner of – eye to hand, hand to eye. Whereas the gaping mouth had drawn us towards ruin, and towards ostracism, where, in our own nineteenth century way, we had also wanted to go.