Why this, why me, why now? Jack looks back
Back in the late 1960s I was a dreamy six-year-old living in a suburban house halfway up a cliff on the edge of what is now Davidson National Park—and already I knew what I wanted to be.
At least I thought I did. Inspired by a junk-shop treasure—a framed print of a painting of Margot Fonteyn in performance (there’s an amazing post about the artist here)—and egged on by all the grownups who warned me the life of a ballerina meant hard work and dedication, I chased the power of voiceless communication for twenty-five years.
Force and form, rhythm and space and dynamic line; presence, attitude, dress and breath and gesture. Communion. Touch. Tangible, readable phenomena that could say so, so, so much more about the human body and its potential—women’s soft-strong power, the sexes and their relationship, their balance, women’s centrality to the quest for this balance—even about the conditional, consensual, culturally-regulated nature of power without violence; that is, without suppression of the other. My intent, as a dancer, was never merely to entertain, but to communicate something essential about life itself—something so much more deeply and mysteriously dynamic and intrinsic than words could ever capture. Something sacramental. Maybe most dancers and musicians feel this way—it’s hard, obviously, to put into words.
In the event, I lacked the steel nerves and byzantine interpersonal skills needed to do well in the world of ballet. Child of a family afflicted with both Asperger’s and Christianity, I was naive, sensitive and self-righteous and I simply had no idea how much strategising is needed to compete amongst the elite for stardom—not that that was my only limitation. In any case, by my twenties I was stuck; I saw that the historic heroines whose biographies I devoured in my childhood lived in a vanished world; cities no longer came to a standstill when a star ballerina arrived. The era of ballet as a significant cultural force had been ending even as I chose it.
What to do, then, with this calling? I felt it strong as ever, the yearning to bear witness, to embody the truth, or at least a truth. My truth, perhaps, but very much my awestruck grasp of the gleaming edge of a universal truth. How to communicate this elusive theme? I’d always been bookish; perhaps a body of text would do after all. I would need to go back to school. University in my early thirties opened my eyes to a world I’d barely imagined, blew my mind and rewired my entire approach to life. But when my husband kicked me out halfway through my degree it prompted a full-blown identity crisis—divorce had not been anywhere on my bucket list. Much soul-searching ensued.
I was grieving, but I was also still euphoric from the Copernican shift of my first semester in philosophy. I had realised—the hard way—that I could not rationally defend even the most attenuated abstraction of a divine creator: I couldn’t prove my God. Suddenly I understood why the prophets always warn against testing God: because He disappears in a puff of smoke. The prophets don’t like that; I found it glorious.
What a blessing, what a marvellous gift from the Universe, to rewrite your own moral code from scratch, testing all assumptions, throwing out injustice and illogic—no matter how many pompous men tell you it’s written in stone! But most glorious of all was the realisation—so deeply contrary to Christian expectations—that we were truly free, as a species, to continue (barring random asteroids) for as long as we were clever enough not to wipe ourselves out.
Because pre-apocalyptic as the millennial times felt, there was as yet no reason to believe (as I now do) that global cataclysm was inevitable; in the year 2000, Donald Trump as US President was still inconceivable. Multiple weather catastrophes weren’t yet part of the daily news. Common sense, history and simple good faith told me we’d muddle through; they wouldn’t let it get that bad.
Could I perhaps sound a warning, to help spread the word? I began to write a tragicomic farce about the end of the world—a bunch of inner-Sydney bohemians navigating a vantablack satire of global current affairs. I added Jezebel St John, a Chinese-Australian mystic embracing martyrdom. The novel sprawled and as fast as I could write it the damn thing was playing out in real life—minus the messianic Jezebel. I wrestled with it, on and off, for years before accepting that the support I needed for such a project just wasn’t available in Sydney and I couldn’t do it alone, and for now—especially now—I needed to create something I could actually present.
Few people could be so dogged in pursuit of something they could hardly articulate, that morphed from ballet into performance art, contemporary music, cabaret, sculpture, modelling—and always writing, writing, writing. Flesh is truth. Balance is dynamic. Everything’s political. I dreamed of a Youtube channel for years before I had the funds or the entrepreneurial spark to pull it together… and now, somehow, here we are.
My tiny team are a godsend and this project was funded entirely by me and is thus entirely dependent on your support for its survival. The content is the fruit of more than forty years of field research and deep reading and bold (or mad) experiments. I hope others will use it, embellish it, rethink it, develop it, and above all test it.
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"The attentive reader may note that I’ve skipped over the years in cabaret and in rock bands..."