On the spectrum of my felt experience, there are two ends that pull apart from each-other to form an expanding whole. Imagine a piece of blutack, pulled between hands and curled towards itself, leaving a small chasm for light to fall into the sphere of self it creates.

On one side is the self that is narrow, close to the narration, commanding, precise, effective, multi-tasking and sharp. She is the athlete, the Founder, the optimiser, the fixer, the doer and the one who makes me chicken soup dutifully when I am unable to get out of bed otherwise. She will tell you that the right time to do something is when you first notice it needs doing.

Across the hallway and down the street, is the self that is full, ripe, digesting, crawling, splayed and sensitive. She is the one who sits in the garden bed, hands muddied and eyes wide. She is the one who bakes bread for fun, who lavishes in lie-ins and needs quiet to see properly the entirety of the world arriving to her. She is the ideas woman, the comforter, the healer, the Aunty. She will listen first and pull words from somewhere outside of her tailored lovingly to the person in front of her.

As you can imagine, writing with these two vying for the wheel can be an easily distracted process. I can go days closer to one than the other. Which, like any pendulum, sees my attention demanded the other way in equal sharing. What is interesting to me is that my athlete/Founder/optimiser/fixer/doer/chicken-soup maker does not surrender easily. She will send emails at 10pm from bed with one eye open. She will tell the hums and aches of the ideas woman/comforter/healer/Aunty to keep waiting.

It is not the doer I am most afraid of though. It is the yielder. She is the one who yields until the system collapses. She reminds me that ah yes, even the worm of the soft body will turn. An absolute of its own. The immovable object that brings the supposedly unstoppable force to a grinding halt. This is the nature of living inside of a feminine body; under duress of lunar tides and other invisible powers; bound to a drawing inward of realisation that is both important and at times, dangerous.

I realised at a young age that my body represented something important to others, mostly in the way that they commented on it as if it was collective property. Later, at sixteen I would be asked to understand violently that my relationship with my body was not important to some men. It took me a lot of time to adjust to a world in which the men I had grown up with and left unquestioned, took a new frightening possibility, as purveyors of harm.

As I age, I am able to grow tendrils of strength atop the fear I learned, and find ways to invite men deeply and intimately into my life as friends, platonic allies and confidantes. This is essential transformative work. And I am highly critical of men who do not attempt a basic level of decency in this world; mainly because I love men enough to hold them close to goodness and kindness. I find the sticky misandry, even that which appears in my mentality through internet slang and collective discourse, tiring now too. I always think of Audre Lorde, and what she would say about how we, as feminists, picked up the master’s tools expecting them to dismantle the violence. That is to say, a gun has one purpose for existence. You can’t hold it and expect peace.

I understand the rage and where it lives. Over a decade ago, there wasn’t as much openness around the way women’s bodies are subject to abuse. This is how sexual assault was and still is commonly inflicted as a sense of brokenness to the receiver; because the instance and pain feels only personal, not part of a long-standing system. This is a place many women are left to sit in, sponging the societal shame of not knowing how to address the predators or harm-makers in our lives. We become the resting place for someone else’s brokenness, and statistically, instead of inflicting the damage outwards, we internalise it. Why I must mention it here, before I attempt to tell you anything is because it is the scar through which all of the tissue of my life has grown. It is beautiful because concurrent with the most original definitions of beauty we have, it transformed me towards moral and intellectual truth.

That truth is, the softest part of my body still experiences terror in vulnerability, sporadically. In a feedback loop I have only been able to identify since sobriety began one and a half year’s ago, I can now look back at the fabric of my life and see what I risked in giving the wrong substances and people access to me. Some things are poison in their very essence and some are taken in measures that render them poison, and whilst I cannot be too critical of myself for not always recognise toxicity immediately, I do know I could have been faster to retract from it.

After experiencing it across contexts, social circles, ages, status levels, I came to learn how abuse is like mould. Once we learn it, experience it, and hold it without release, reprieve or opportunities for catharsis, we come to expect it and behave through its expectation, becoming its safe harbour. Surprisingly, even after reading hundreds of women’s testimonials and being failed by the justice system several times, my compassion and simultaneous desire for accountability for perpetrators deepens. It is not interesting to me how our society reproduces abuse, appropriating it through unlikely avenues. As satisfying as an eye for an eye can feel initially, I fear we move towards collective blindness out of self-loathing. As much as there can be satisfaction in the confirmation of the familiar and as much awareness I have for how a certain performance of blondeness lends itself to an audience’s comfortability— especially when she is consumed or destroyed in some grotesque way— I want to be responsible for something worth replicating in this world (not to be confused for being flawless, as that is something I find increasingly uninteresting).

Sobriety. The window opened one morning, and I knew I had to leave not just the relationship I was in at the time but the relationship I’d developed with escapism. Drugs were the first to go almost completely, and then alcohol followed shortly after. Alcohol was the gateway to a space where I could be more loosely bound to all of the things I didn’t like about the world and how I’d found myself in it. I used to use my hangovers as a sort of transformative container, pledging to do something differently once I emerged from the controlled lows. And I increasingly came good on those pledges, building my risk portfolio with greater confidence.

Back then, there was easier discussion to be had by a bottle of red wine in the deep evening. My lips hung looser, wrapping around hard truths with less friction, and my perpetual anxiousness to get away from myself finally slowed down enough to comprehend the beauty peering back at me from over the glass. I romanticised the way I could disappear into the subtle-beyond of lost time, reuniting with all of my past selves frozen in their respective melancholic places, tying knots in scarves to thread forward, in hope of being pulled out of the well of the past by some sturdier, more competent hands. I had been trying to outsource the labour of it for such a long time- the saving of myself- until a morning when I caught my hands pulling open the glassed frame in front of a city I really didn’t love, and realised that they could be mine.

My hands had intermittently felt like they were on loan, really since the first sexual assault at sixteen. Before then I had a self-assuredness and precocity that isn’t generally encouraged in young women. I smoked a lot of weed to blur the sting of the loss of my agency, and to pretend I consented to feeling unreal. Collapsed into that was my youth lived through the come-up of the internet where I was rewarded with social currency for the way I could survive the fragmenting of self into the digital world. By around 18, after being bullied through my teenage years for being objectively undesirable, I was invited into the modelling industry where I put myself up for sale. I managed myself mostly, and got off on the surge of being the hot new thing for a few years in the commercial industry, working all of the surf and swim brands on the East Coast.

At around twenty the novelty began to wear off and I stopped enjoying working with random photographers. I noticed how there was always three of me in the room when I shot. 1. The girl I was, real and living and unsure. 2. The construction of me in the photographer’s mind. And, 3. the immortalised final edit, who became a canvas for interpretation at the mercy of the beholder. Sometimes my skin had been airbrushed or my waist trimmed, which I found funny more than anything because I never looked at someone and found either of those things made them less attractive.

Over the years, especially as my audience increased, I would receive all sorts of commentary. Sometimes it would be about my weight, who I reminded people of, of people’s disapproval with my outfits or life choices, or maybe even people who had become reliant on my content and bestowed me with a heroic quality I didn’t want to own. I was no longer a life lived, my name and its derivations were the site of a third space that thousands of faceless names could access. As time progressed, I got blonder and was cast in more archetypal campaigns for my look. My sensuality and determination to be an experience instead of a flat image read interestingly on camera, and whilst I worked to be full in my construction of femininity as a nuanced woman— unapologetically vulnerable and controversially opinionated if need be— all people seemed to see was sex. It was a sort of Marilyn Monroe effect. Around twenty-three, I was approached by a content platform to begin distributing and owning my own sensual images.

It felt like a scary frontier, to be a woman co-opting her sexual commoditisation loudly; to be profiting from my body and face the same way brands had been buying my image or promotional slots for years. There is a ring of shame within the modelling industry, because sexual fantasy is widely held as only being acceptable when someone else bestows it upon you. You have to feign unawareness, and labour to make it effortless, because to co-opt it, makes you dirty or dangerous somehow.

So in the scheme of my own self-understanding, my participation in the content economy became a consent question, and I decided nothing could hurt me more than the consumption of my body without my express permission. So I sold my own photos for two-ish years, and it funded my survival in the most expensive cities in the world, supporting me whilst I transitioned into a life that made me harder to coerce. I built my own business. Paid off my HECs debt. I launched a nation-wide sexual violence survey during that time and started a lot of other interruptive conversations on the internet that I’d like to think moved the needle somehow.

I learned a lot about internalised shame through the women close to me by the way they treated me when they realised I had gotten outside of the fence; some of them eventually revealing a deep resentment for how I moved in the world. And I also learned about the fragility men struggle with, in their own patriarchal docility prescribed to them. It was a living thesis on the relationship between fear and sex that I don’t feel qualified to finish just yet.

At some point last year, processing all of the memories freed by my sobriety and navigating new levels of career intensity, I developed a chronic stress related illness. Recurrent stomach ulcers. Thankfully, around the same time my Instagram was deleted by the Meta gods. Although I lost thousands of dollars worth of content contracts, and hundreds of relationships contained only on that platform, I was lighter suddenly.

Having been her for around half of my life, I didn’t know who or what I was without my digital avatar. sophie_marsh/serpentofvenus was a practice of apparition for me, to visualise form, to re-position circumstances in my favour, and to weave a better life into existence. There was immense grief in the lightness and waiting for who I would become next. I also had no recollection of a reference point for the sort of expectation-lessness that came with digital anonymity. That void of beginning again and wiping an old, heavily drawn on slate clean, contained all sorts of fears and hopes and realisations. It was the gift of space; to hear, to see, to curate anew. And it was at first with terror that I began learning my sense of taste all over again.

I often speak about the golden thread sensation I have been visited by many times. It is a visceral positive ache of my being toward an open door materialising in front of me. It is what helped me leave home at seventeen, begin my exit from abuse at twenty-one, book a flight to New York at twenty-three, and several others that year to London, Paris and Turkey that would reveal new faces and voices I needed to encounter. It is what brought me into sobriety. Pushed me to start my own digital agency. And onto Country for the first time in connection with Yalanji culture. The more I listen, the clearer it gleams, a strengthened pact between myself and my divine sources: right between knowing what you can control, and praying that the things you can’t control will not be beyond your ability to handle them.

This is where the two ends of my own whole meet in equal parts discomfort and innocence. It is delicate because it is the result of echolocation. You cannot mark this where on a map. You and I emerge in different places when we get free in this way. But the door to shame is unguarded, and unlocked for us all.

A room of one’s own, Virginia Woolf’s literature, captured me somewhere at the beginning of my sobriety journey. I realised that whilst the room she references may in fact be a physical place, it is also the experience of a living place she puts her finger on. That is to say that for many women, the right to have a body of our own will, volition, and desire-scape, is still a fantasy. One that we must live towards, without explanation or fear of imperfection.

My how: letting people misunderstand me, creek swims, shaking my ass in the mornings for as long as it takes to feel good, day naps (no alarm), dirtying my hands in the garden, reiki self-healing (new skill), prioritising heart-openers in my yin practice, resistance training, weekly chicken congee, keeping love letters on my fridge, LBDO candle-lit showers (strict no big light rule), and coconut water whenever I so feel.

To live in a reclaimed body, is a groundhog day I prayed for in many different ways, where we, my body and I, exist in mutual, private understanding. It is enough to feel, safely. In an optimisation economy, that is actually the goal.

Footnote: Thank you to LBDO for inviting me out of my writing hiatus. I see more commentary in this space as the collective consciousness arrives to the bitter realisation that we have entered an era where everything is sexual, nothing is erotic. This is a social issue as eroticism is an essential precursor to the formation of robust joy. Over the years, my erotic practices have varied, from explorative self-pleasure (very early 2020s of me) to a more recent curiosity around healing, non sexual self touch. Backdropping my progression, LBDO has been part of that journey- from the first Essensual Vibe I owned to my refills of their Mood Oil and Essensual Melt Massage candles. My self massage practice has actually always been tinged by the herbaceous warmth of their Mood oil, across many seasons. The ingredient quality and potency demonstrates how much they understand that self-nourishment is more than a performance. After all, self-pleasure tools should never replace human touch, just compliment it, which is what LBDO does best.

The two most asked questions recently are: where did you move, and what happened to your body. These ones I teeter around with questions of how much access I want people to have to me, after a period of decommissioning digital intimacy with my body and my writing. They pertain to a homeliness I have been forging for the past 10 months but also forever, unmistakably. Of course, there is curiosity there that I welcome and the performer inside my shyness relishes in. But I can’t help but notice the ferocity of the desire for me to fall, for the muse to be slaughtered contained within the questioning. The implied suffering they are intended to discover. The internet is after all, the modern day colosseum, and once the old poet has delivered her bards and the maiden has danced beautifully, people are still left wanting blood. And I have none spare.

Something I have developed an astuteness for in more recent months is the way in which those who stand around us also want us to fail. I have been pressed very close to people who despite their love for me, also deeply desire opportunity to remove its hand from my door. In this economy, we are tricked into competing creatively, and as women, in ways that make acts of connection— to work, to romance— feel like warfare. I, of course, understand it and can relate to the fearful illusion that the second someone steps out into the light, I must be left in shadow. But relevancy is incredibly boring as a concept to me. The turret of the castle is not an interesting place for me anymore, now that I’ve seen inside of it.

For the past few years, I have been deliberately rinsing my followership online. After using provocation as a cleansing tool, I am slowly becoming milder and generically brand safe which is important for longevity in the higher arts I am breaking into. At times I do miss when I was operating as “serpentofvenus” and experimenting with my own sexual personnae, welcoming dialogue and intrigue into where sensuality becomes sexual, and the need for clearer distinction between the two. I will say, erotica as a practice is part of the reason I am so alive.

In its initial, purest form, all erotica is is the devotion to awakening senses, able to be procured from any moment in the “how” something is done. It is the manner of speaking, the combing of one’s hair to stimulate the tension of the skull’s attachment to the follicle in a pleasurable way, the lingering tastes: how long we are willing to stay within a feeling. Pleasure is then not inherently sexual, but we have seen performance of pleasure and sex to such a degree that we find it hard to connect with the feelings both contain. The function of pleasure has been lost to the form here, in our digitally lifted world. And to experience the fullness erotica demands, you must meet the floor of your soul in the dark. You must learn the feeling of your own hands across your body so you know how they are reaching out toward the world around you. To notice, to listen, to wait, to ask questions: are all liberating skills and erotic tools.

Metaphysically, what exists in one directional force has an equal and opposite. We live in a society that prioritises and welcomes one presentation of aliveness and new age spirituality has even deemed this “light”. Save a place for joy, for peace, for ease, for exactitude. Erase the rest.

This is the extremism of the binary, even cast throughout politics and gender identity which sees us ending up as our inversions constantly. I have seen mainstream feminism that has begun to resemble incel culture in how it categorises and speaks about men. In the far left becoming as blood thirsted and determined on weaponising as the exact causes they stand against. I have personally experienced the way lightness culture, the collective rejection of truth in its entirety, becomes a mechanism of harm to self and other. We are not ready to discuss the impact of this on the Earth, but unmistakably wellness and conservation are inextricably linked.

People will beg to be part of community and then cut someone off for lagging in reply. “I deserve better”, is a common mantra of the culture that says we can discard relationships at the point where they flicker in their usefulness to us. There is a dystopian, utilitarian essence to what we try to bend our hearts towards. Dating apps are one of the clearest examples of where the extreme desire to feel connected, to be nurtured and loved, sees us degrade ourselves and each-other so easily. This is the trouble with trying to make ourselves or our relationships convenient: in their very makeup, existence is not convenient. The more you opt out of the wholeness of your experience, the more difficult it becomes to live.

Removing alcohol and drugs from my life almost 10 months ago was one of the best and hardest things I ever did. I could see with clarity all of the ways ambiguity had snuck into my connections, where I was being used instead of respected, and where it still hurt. Truthfully, after my breakup and moving to the city, new friends and career flourishing, my panic and anxiety was worse than ever.

I often speak of the well of pain I visited for the first time as a place in time and space during my sexual assault as my mind fled my body. With clarity I could see in my mind’s eye, a calm voidal space and a deep chasm that glistened down the bottom with liquidous contents. I saw myself sitting there peacefully, and I joined her, two versions of me split by circumstance come to sit with their grief. I noticed how the event I was experiencing, although my eyes were no longer open in the real world, was filling this well inside my mind. It was the tears I couldn’t cry, remnants of my childhood that led me here back towards pain, and the aching sensation of deserving hard things. It was the revisiting of the feeling of not being believed as a child, something I didn’t yet know came with womanhood even more intensely. I have spoken to many women about this well, the place where anger defaults to water, and lives inside our wombs. Some of this water was gifted to me by my mother and my grandmother whose wombs I have shared.

The month before I left for Africa I was doing some of my best work as a creative, and simultaneously I was experiencing the most intense depression I’ve faced. With nothing to blunt it with, I resorted to managing it in silence as I found myself experiencing breathless panic attacks more frequently. There wasn’t a rhythm I could distinguish, and having survived my whole life by knowing things, not knowing the why or the how to this bodily affliction was part of the panic itself.

It brings us to the question of where I moved and why. I didn’t return to Melbourne after Africa, not because I didn’t love the city and the people, but because my spirit was breaking apart. I had moved to Melbourne as a reaction to a breakup I didn’t ultimately want to accept. It was the best choice at the time, but it was a choice I had to make under extreme duress.

I had been completely hollowed out by the act of wanting a reality and a something that didn’t want me back: where was my home if it wasn’t with this person? Where had I gone, to become such a gaping entity unto myself, that home no longer existed within me?

My body and I are healing and reeling from a year of lying on the floor in the dark. From the well, to the sunless winter of Melbourne in my lightless bedroom, I couldn’t help but notice stars everywhere. My friends I could be in flesh physicality with, Yasmin and Angus, were two constellations of enormous magnitude. The crying in public places unashamedly, the non lateral conversations about the absurdity of realising existence, the trees at the park just by my house, the long phone calls from people I loved, cooking all day long just to feel the beauty my hands could create, and actively manipulating aesthetics towards transformative ability, all parted the clouds just long enough for the glimmer of starlight to get through.

By the time I got to Africa though, I was very unwell. I was off the back of an intense work residency combined with back-to-back productions that asked me to prioritise the work over my emotional experience of the work. By day 2 of being in Namibia I had a diagnosis of my first stomach ulcer and a simultaneous e-coli infection. As I travelled through Namibia and Botswana with my family in a ten-seater bus, I faded in and out of viscerality, noticing how the pain in the centre of my chest that sent me into long dissociative naps, correlated with the well I mentioned before’s emptying. I found forgiveness in that bus. I made a playlist to honour it daily. I forgave my mother and father in the sand dunes of Namibia, I forgave my ex-partner several times and then several times again, I forgave my friends for various things, wrote goodbye letters in the form of apologies (some of which I sent and some of which I didn’t) and then I forgave myself, every day. Over a month of not being able to eat much except for rice and the coolness of alkaline vegetables like cucumber in small amounts, I had noticed a change in my vitality, despite my slightness of body. The disruption of bodily inputs, the lack of phone reception, combined with the brutality and beauty of where I was, seemed to have allowed enough space and time for the emptying of the well that had become a swamp inside of me. Untended grief, trauma from decades ago, swimming out of the burning hole in my chest. Pain as brevity. Decay as a chance for new lightness to evolve. I had energy and a new thankfulness for being alive.

So the body you see now, the smaller one, is one that is well loved. It is fed with fresh coconut and fruit and vegetables and rice and salt and ghee. I am a week or so away from finishing the clonazepam prescribed to sever the mind-gut inflammation long enough for me to determine a new baseline of neutrality.

I found an acre block on Yalanji Country, just north of Mossman, far North Queensland. I wake up to bird song, alone. I go to my fridge and take a corkscrew to a coconut to start my day. I look at my wooden floored home, still half empty, and am reminded about the art of becoming. There is never nothing to do. There are bananas to harvest, citrus blooming, seedlings to water, grass to mow, snakes to notice, floors to sweep and naps to be had. I am often visited by friends who are just passing by my place, and I get to give them fruit or vegetables from my land. There are creeks here, special for grounding. Ones I won’t tell you about because of how they were shown to me.

The other night, Uncle Richard and I went for a drive to Julaymba just in time to catch the farmers on the ridge back burning. Plumes of thick smoke puffed throughout the valley, crowning Kija (moon) with a soft halation. We waited an hour for it to get dark so we could catch photos of the embers and the bubbling ribbons of fire, quelled by the setting sun, running in lines that traced the mountain’s curves with a precise tenderness sort of like lava. I shifted gears in the Toyota Hilux on the way home, stopped suddenly by an olive python stretched from one side of the road to the other, unmoving. Another visit from a serpent, making it the third reminder of transformation in motion this week. After I coaxed it from the road, the girl who’d developed such an intense driving anxiety she could scarcely sit in a passenger seat for the past 2 or so years, was someone I knew existed once, but couldn’t recall the face of.

I once asked myself: if I was a garden, how many mouths could I feed? And here, there is no limit. I wake up with prayer brimming from my heart in delight for the day. I find myself moving from love instead of grasping for it. There is an abundance of sun, there are blessings in Ulysses butterflies and the circular fruit economy between me and my neighbours. I am new, but I also feel exactly myself. So it makes sense I woke up to a firefly on my floor this morning, and there’s a sunbird nest outside my window, and I made a bet with God on a meat tray that if I won, I’d move here, and my number 42 ticket got grand prize.

It revealed a lack of patience in me, but if you do find yourself in the dark for a long time, the clouds eventually move to reveal stars. And if you are looking for them, you will notice how the space between each star is a pixelation of infinite others, so densely packed together it appears initially as darkness. So get comfortable on the floor, make yourself a tea, call someone you love. The end is also the beginning.

Approaching five months sober, my Saturday night is spent in front of my iMac, navigating near misses between my elbows, a bowl of strawberry tops, and a half-finished, gone-cold eucalyptus tea. These are signs I have loved myself well. After dinner— a roast chicken for one that I reheated— I hand-squeezed myself some orange juice, dragging that unfortunate elbow across the bench through sticky orange blood.

I remember how an orange has reimagined love for me in many ways throughout my life. My father had peeled oranges for me up until I left home at 17, even if I was sullen or had upset my mother. In his absence, I started practising it as an act of care for my friends who in their late angsty, teen-hood hadn’t been able to justify the effort for themselves. Later I learnt the delight of hand-squeezing juice from fresh oranges from a spontaneous lover. Then I remember: the sensuality of a morning, sunlight, the care that is required to meet the mess of its making, the burst of flavour on your palette to enliven your sleepy mouth, the smell left on skin after the final sip has been devoured, a somewhat antiseptic reset for morning breath allowing self-consciousness to dissolve. Even though it was roughly 745pm, all of this rides on my half glass of colander strained oj and I am reminded that I do love myself. The best thing about an orange is that its profile never changes; it is always whimsical and satisfying all at once.

I was on the phone to a writer friend of mine newly returned to Paris, I told him about my waning will to exist in Australian cultural dissonance as a romantic, crowning Paris and Barcelona as the ultimate lovergirl’s safe haven. Laughing, he replied: “Of course, it’s literally in the Parisian walls”. By that he meant that the architecture of the city is intrinsically romantic, that it both demands and echos intimacy; it steals your glances, runs away with your imagination and demands you stay a little longer, leaving as I have done with ideals that beg to be relived. The cobblestones and terracotta chimneys a deliberate evocation of aliveness, informing people that they ought to live with liberty and intrigue in mind. This is an example of what my new muse (read: big, giant brain) Roger Scruton would describe as “where being and seeming coincide”. So much of a city, or of ourselves, is reliant upon how we are recognised. What Scruton says constitutes real beauty is our ability to be true. For our seeming and being to harmonise. Because he is a professor of aesthetics and because of his beliefs about beauty, I know that Roger Scruton would smell really good.

I have been doing a lot of wondering post break-up, post city-move, in the throes of sobriety, if I am any longer what I seem? And more than that, if I like how I seem. Especially as my baseline feeling changes, and the combination of being almost 27 and sober makes me no longer numb or afraid. Even moreso because I am actively building evidence that I can handle discomfort. In the frame of the Hinge app or a Raya profile, I am forced to reckon with how I can use my marketing skills to make myself seem closer to what I am, to achieve beauty on the screen that someone else will recognise as valuable.

The subconscious motivation here is a promise of what will happen when you get “hot” enough to be recognised as hot. For me at least, the loop goes something like this:

1. when I am hot enough someone hot will find me hot

2. when I am hot enough I will make a big break (get picked for something hot, go “viral”, have access to hotter stuff)

3. when I am hot enough, I will get hotter, and then I will never not be hot

All of this hinged to the need for a mirror to validate that a) I am hot, and b) that I am hot enough for the things that I find hot.

Aristotle was one of the first to talk about our potential for change. This potentiality is the inner power natural things possess to go from seed to tree. There is in some form, a knowledge within us of the ends we are seeking, just as a seed carries the genetic code of the tree it will become. Aristotle calls this deep proper knowing, virtue. How we get there, how we actualise, how we become the tree, is what he calls skill.

To relate it to my XXL Ganni bag, potential is the total capacity of the bag, and actuality is the bag’s real contents at any given time. Skill is how we discern and navigate what goes in the bag. Virtue is to make our choices relevant to a beneficial future. i.e. When you live in the city, it is skilful to take a fully juiced portable charger with you, a full waterbottle, some gum, charged airpods, a journal, a pen and a book, when your desired end is to make your voyage with as minimal anxiety as possible. The skill is really just you pre-empting your own needs.

Something I have been fighting off for years is the way that late-stage capitalism disrupts us from virtue; from remembering what it’s all for and where we are going. From actualising. From having a good fucking time. As long as there can be more problems made of things, the more we will keep buying bigger bags to fit more shit into. The more we keep believing in a “hot enough” just out of reach, the easier it is to sell things to us that promise to bridge that gap. We become self-diagnosed problems, forever trying to heal the never-ending brokenness that is defined for us.

Modernism, even its art, relies on this sort of desecration and uglification of the culture; a deliberate splitting apart of the hopes and beauties we have remaining. We see this in modernist architecture with its angular, minimalist lines and uncaring facades. There is a certain charm to disenchantment that the upper-echelon arthouse skater/surfer community weaponises. It provides a facade of distinction, that intimates that you haven’t been taken in by anything and that makes you superior. This separateness is what happens when we make beauty and art a substitute for religion, and when it fails to give us our redemption. We become angry at beauty that does not transport us to purity, so we seek revenge on it.

This is typified in the way our culture treats modern celebrities, as we watch their disfigurement with glee and horror simultaneously. Culture still loves to consume a woman and then discard her, as they did with Marilyn and Britney and Anna Nicole. Serves her right for being beautiful! And the conveyor belt moves even faster still with modern Youtubers and Tiktokers whose time in the sun averages but a few years. See the body horror playing out in real time as Kris Jenner launches her new face, and Tiktok stars livestream their nose job healing process.

The most real thing, is how we are left feeling. We know we are being uglified by the oversimplification of our personalities, of the flattening of human texture through therapy speak and image augmentation and filters. We notice that the things that didn’t use to bother us, are just three more targeted ads away from becoming a ChatGPT search that tries to deny the effect, like “natural alternatives to botox”. My search history is so telling that my virtue needs revival.

Another theory classic, Immanuel Kant, talks about reason consisting of two types of knowledges. The first being a priori knowledge, or knowledge that is derived from mathematical rules, tautologies or definition. The second being empirical knowledge which is interested with the sensations something gives us. We have seen a fixation on a priori in our modern classifications of beauty. Defined by algorithm, by the golden ration, by symmetry, by mm of juvaderm, this physical plane of control is what can be bought and sold most directly. We can say, by the laws of hotness, someone with many followers must be beautiful. Someone with a symmetrical face automatically becomes beautiful because that is the tautology: facial harmony equals beauty.

What remains lesser considered, mainly because it’s harder to tamper with and artificially inseminate, is the empirical knowledge of beauty. This sort of knowledge has to do with essence. With how we make those around us feel. With how we feel to be in others’ presence. It is difficult at times to place value on how we feel when there is no-one but ourselves to experience it. We are free beings in this way, perceiving the “rightness” of things in relation to the world around us. And ourselves. Do I fit in? Am I graceful? Am I kind? Do I lend something of importance to the world around me? Roger Scruton talks about how the deepest purpose of beauty is to search for a home. To make things belong to one another. And how being at home is to see yourself as another.

This is what Aristotle would call actualising. Of making a home of ourselves. Of our being and seeming colliding. And, it is also what Instagram gurus tell us is authenticity as they sell you their next course on how to fix your childhood trauma so you too can be more authentic. Some of them are really good, actually.

It is hard to not instrumentalise yourself or someone else in the process of becoming. To not turn yourself into an object that requires constant mending. It is disencouraged by everything we are surrounded by to stay with the discomfort of being, to deny living in our empirical data, our wrinkles, our insecurities. Here, deep in mine, I turn yet more of my ephemeral life experiences into documents for other people to skim past and assign value to. This is not itself a problem, I don’t think. I wish I could ask Roger Scruton. It only becomes one when I make the orange juice because I said it was good to do, without really tasting it. Resenting the spillage on the bench.

The surge in Australia’s commissioned mainstream spectacles of violence is an interesting one, where the intent can for some products be hopefully as it reads: to become more intimate with the horrible thing, so we do not repeat it. In the time between my watching and the writing of this, I have seen as many interviews with the show’s talent confirming as much. But when something derived with the implied intent of paying homage to lives lost senselessly is nested into a greater environment that not only celebrates war but continues it’s legacy, we must question whether its existence and creation is truly naive, or expressly complicit in warmongering. That is to say that we are quick to name media as radicalisation when it arrives as non-state terrorism (e.g. ISIS recruitment videos, incel forums, fringe propaganda), but slow to see it in high-budget depictions of horror and masculine pain we gather around reverently.

In this particular text adapted for screen we experience a certain double derivation, once by Flanagan the author of the book to bring a foreign but familial war’s form into existence on behalf of his father, and then once again by Director Justin Kurzel for the contemporary streaming platform. The secret third derivation is the commissioning of the piece by the profiting bodies (i.e. Amazon, Screen Australia and friends) under the sole interest of commercial value, one of the less considered energetic properties of modern art. As artists it is the leg we often try to hide, relegating the mechanism of funding to inconsequential outside of original function: to get the art made. As if it is possible to have a nameless sperm donor, homogenised of its genetic coding. Plucked from a catalogue, and devoid of resemblance to its maker.

To notice it, asks an uncomfortable question of us all: Who is paying, and for what?

Depicting violence no-one else wills to, is brave. There is undoubtedly a time and place for truth-telling, as long as we can remember that “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”. The unspeakable things will at best resemble our cosplayed versions of them, but they will always fall short of the horror real.

What can be true at the same time is that for any artist, to be unaware of their affectivity; the connective tissue they are feeding fresh blood to; is to sever art’s relationship with its own muse, in favour of hedonistic realisation. Of being the boldest, the most disturbing. The God-on-Earth who moved the mountain. Gaspar Noe, responsible for one of my favourite movies Love, is loathed and loved for this sort of face-grazing work.

As an audience, the colosseum is playing out in high definition from private viewing suites, with the illusion of non-consequence as we fight our nervous systems to accept intimacy with the grotesque. It is just a show, the condolence we offer ourselves. And then to self-regulate, we scroll through feeds speckled with beheadings and people both psychologically and physically beaten, as the normalisation of violence supposes its continuation after a show like this one has ended. How far have we actually been moved if glimpsing the terrible thing brings us no closer to preventing these forms of violence?

Many artists do not wish to be arrested by their artistic choices in this way, yet seek nothing less than influence and remembrance in their work. It is an interesting paradox, to affix your name to a project loudly and then hope simultaneously that the death of the author has already taken place upon its release. Know me for my greatness, not for my weakness. That is very human. But it is also desperately disconnected from societal reality, especially in the hall of mirrors we have built.

It seems as if some of us are looking, quite desperately, for an exit to the loop of violence, yet the collective distance between dissociation and extreme palpability, means that one man’s motivation to exit is another man’s re-entrance to the comfort of the known. It means, we are not ready for the death of violence, we are still coming to terms with its face, and how it feels in our bodies. We become impatient with the cycle, and in our calls to end violence, pick up its tools in hopes it’ll carry us forward. And for some, the violence itself is the realest thing they feel. It is the muse.

I have known this best when I have infiltrated male spaces, sometimes accidentally. 6am, unslept on white plastic chairs in an Australian backyard, the final beers being downed. I am there mostly listening, and we are awake and unable to find rest for similar but different reasons pertaining to our inability to cope with feeling bad. One conversation I recall was a few surfers and their videographers discussing the glory of the brawl, and how they miss it, how good it felt to exert their force against someone else. I remember it particularly because when I finally spoke I said how unrelatable I found that, and how ultimately terrifying and sobering it was to hear the quiet thing be said out loud.

A couple of them proceeded to tell me how I didn’t understand it, that it was sacred to a male experience that I wasn’t privy to or capable of knowing. As if I hadn’t been conditioned and employed to conduct the exact emotional reproduction that soothed the wounds of men for free for most of my life. Notice how we are relieved to make someone else a home for our shame. Ignoring the actuality of the times I had been on the receiving end of blows, manipulated into power struggles, and forced to flee the assertion of male bodies onto mine against my will. As if it wasn’t that exact violence that led me to that now 6:45am scene, wishing I didn’t need to feel numb to feel validated.

It reminds me now of something Uncle Richard, a dear friend of mine, said to me in the context of understanding red cedars and his people’s history in the Daintree where he’s from. That if you’re not willing to harm someone weaker than you, you usually harm yourself.

If you have ever interviewed a war veteran, unanimously, once you are let past the veneer that shame builds, you will hear little else as clearly as the pleading echo of the sentiment: never again. Around age 14 at the peak of my leadership potential, I was given the prestigious role of Middle School Captain. Aside from being resented, one of my job perks was hosting veterans on ANZAC day, where I was given hours to drink tea and engage in conversation instead of going to class. I was smaller and blonde and disarming, able to discuss my modern history projects delicately with them, gleaning careful insight into the way you are rearranged by combat, even when it is considered noble and proper. When I think of this particular show, and of the people and damages it depicts, I wonder if this show was made with the thought of those service men and women as audience? Of how they would feel watching episodic interpretations of realities they actually lived? Would it bring them comfort to see the attempts to speak what they had vowed not to repeat? From my own reckonings with C-PTSD, it is certainly not something I would feel comfortable asking someone to watch in order to garner me an answer.

Here, there is tension between whether now, in an age where there are fewer veterans, where war seems both imminent and yet removed, are we actually echoing the idea that lives have been lost senselessly with life-sized media, or if in the capitalist wheel, we are committing to make sense of it. That suffering has a utility, as long as someone is getting paid.

I always wonder what we owe the dead when we speak of their pain. And the living, whose brutalisation continues, as colonial violence remains mantled.

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