Scissors (pt.Chapter 1)

CONTENTS

1.          Busy Cell
2.          Inamorata
3.          Take Away
4.          Garden
5.          Metamorphosis
6.          No Act of Kindness
7.          Show and Tell
8.          Acceptance
9.          Nothing But Mammals
10.          After Party
11.          Day of Sorrow
12.          Day of Light
13.          Catalyst
14.          Carpe Vir
15.           Air
16.           The City of Prudencia




1.          BUSY CELL

Each time I prepare for a new presentation I have to make it better than the last. The metaphors proliferating and squabbling for inclusion invigorate the new material. But I can only ever really talk about what I’m imagining at the time and I give the creative spirit rope. I can only imagine how I’m feeling.
I enjoy research and creativity as long as they are kept at arm’s length.
On creativity: The singular most advanced and critical trait of humankind. No endeavour, no ideal, no concept, no state comes close to this virtuosity.
In saying this I am careful. There is no ultimate definition of anything, therefore truth is unequivocally vague. Amen.
Nevertheless, only the stupid throw out the wonderful concept baby with the imperfect bathwater. There is no quest that is perfect so we have to track all the great stuff like creativity, truth and love through murky distractions.
It is germane that us humans’ first appreciation of creativity was something that only God had the power of: ex nihilo; creation from nothing. No mean feat to be sure.
However, magical periods in civilisation emancipate us from doctrine. Thanks here go in the first instance to the usual suspects, the Greeks and Romans, not for recognising creativity but for actually doing it, and at least calling it ‘genius’. When they started using poetry as an efficient form of expression it soon got esoteric and exciting. But all the time, since early man scratched pictures of bison on cave walls, the Mother of Creation: the amazing yin, patiently nurtured the phenomenon, while it took centuries for us just to identify it. We are forever on the quest to understand creativity while we concurrently promote banal issues of existence. Creativity enables human purpose but we progress technology and virtualisation, actually we venerate it. Some I have met outside of my imagination; outside of my reality, inside of my library, have been punters at the opposite end of creativity. One was a builder, another sold real estate. I argue with them in my mind. They say I am lucky for them that I have a roof over my head and I say you are an imbecile; you are lucky that I do. You think you make something invaluable but you did nothing but be the end user of imagination; demersal fish feeding off settled concepts on the ocean floor.  I will respect that you as a serf when you recognise so much as a hint of originality.
Never establish a pattern of thinking or a pattern of behaviour, not even if it is lateral thinking. Stay curious, ignorant, clumsy, emotional, decent, loose, conservative, obscure, vague, intense, obsessive, present, resigned, radical, ashamed, thrifty, mischievous, proud, weak, strong and reactive all at the time. Light the wick; for creativity is incendiary.
It is interesting but not telling, that the symposia on creativity opened in the Christian world while Eastern regimes saw creation as mimicry or discovery, albeit this pole of creativity is vital to the phenomenon.
By the late nineteenth-century, art was pretty much the exclusive domain of creativity with only Genesis exclusive to God. The appropriately wide net was cast. Then of bloody course, we had to look to science to study concepts that were only proper to art; the chronic frustration of edification by certainty compulsion. We ponder the blades but not the pivot.
The last century of theory is by no means uninteresting and by all means, wayward. Of interest to me is the discussion on positive and negative affective influence. The question you have to ask is: do positive emotions or moods increase creativity cognition or do negative ones; is it joy or depression? Me, I’m pro both. I’m bipolar like my scissors and I’m the pivot screw. My scissors are paradise and the black dog, and it’s their coordinated coexistence that projects my world.
That world is balanced. It is three-dimensional, gridded, spherical and coloured in chromatic greys with highlights of brilliant ochre. Family, friends, career, mood, health, spirit… everything that defines me is self-contained, formalised and systematised.
Basically, the pattern of creativity is the random scramble for precedence between affects: mood as antecedent to creativity, mood as direct consequence of creativity, mood as an indirect consequence of creativity and mood simultaneous with creativity. They chase each other around a tree like the tigers in The Story of Little Black Sambo until they are reduced to a pool of sweet melted butter.
None of this matters of course. We mustn’t ever, ever be misguided by the charisma of doctrine. There is no conclusion, only the feeble use of everything from science to voodoo to theorise phenomenon.
Creativity hangs off the left hand end of the interpretation-copy continuum.
My mind is crowded. Strangers in traditional dress, a pitiable woman holding a baby, a sleeper carriage on an old train, revelling footballers, a political prisoner in a humid country, a couple contemplating children, industrial pollution, a brash young professional, a smear of fertilised quail egg in a Petri dish and cobras: everyone and everything is a rampant tale. Add to that the philosophy, the voices and the dreams, and my mind is a busy cell.
But not a prison cell. I know my body is the only thing that can stop my mind passing through walls so I separate them. When my mind wants to go walkabout, it does so. When it wants love it can whisper words of comfort into my ear and I give myself over to it.
The ultimate application of creativity is to design and build our own reality. Better still; make it the reality of others too. I write more than I care to mention.

On sharing: Giving is the most sustainable part of a pairing. Giving and receiving are barely discernable and interchangeable like the contribution each scissor makes to cutting. A scissor cannot give to the act of cutting without receiving the oncoming blade and we cannot receive unless we give.
But there has to be a lead giver. Like evolution, there is some small moment in time when fission begets a chain reaction of to and fro. Everything extant is a part of an asymmetrical pair and the lead giver fertilises a receiver immediately before they each experience both giving and receiving. The flow of giving is almost indiscernible in the perfect friendship but the lead giver is the one with the prevailing instinct to give in a vacuum; ex nihilo. She is the finger blade.
Sharing isn’t an evolutionary fait accompli but rather, it is paradise; enlightenment at the end of a succession of reincarnation.

Don’t confuse giving with kindness. Giving is practical in nature; there will be evidence of the transition of sustenance through personal effort, some level of altruism, some sacrifice and it will elicit giving. Kindness is insidious. The offer is conditional and reciprocation is mandatory. It elicits dependence.
Favourite label:        Periscope.
Favourite movies:    Let’s Scare Jessica to Death.
Favourite food:        Caesar Salad.
Favourite song:        Breathless.
Favourite colour:    Purple.
Favourite number:  Two.

I plan on speaking at the Penguin Club, an association of mostly older women from rich suburbs. I will do a bit of thinking about the audience profile and underscore the address appropriately.
If you are lecturing or making a point, determination and plausibility are more seductive and rapturous than accuracy. And the corollary: resolution is more compelling than rectitude. In a sense, don’t trust anyone who is charismatic… except me.
You have to be healthy to present well. That means fit and clean inside. That helps with projection and sincerity. When I project, I imagine I am seducing. Not the playboy type of seduction. There is a seduction that is a gift to the seducee and you don’t want anything back; it’s in the giving. So I exercise every day; mostly dancing in my bedroom. Not just slow waltzing Bryan Ferry style but I also dance a lot of go-go. And yoga.
I lecture about scissors. I own them, write about them and draw them. Mostly I use them to make an analogy my world.

Core belief: Life is a gift. Humbly reciprocate with purpose. Purpose is the theory and the research but not the proof. Life is a library; a round domed collection of proposals that argue purpose from zealous dogma to demure suggestion. Purpose is the writing and reading but not the conclusion.

“Good morning Prudence.” Casual, neutral, respectful and mid-tone. Mum doesn’t call out to me from another room because she knows I don’t like it. She gets near before she talks. That’s not to say she never talks loud; she gets excited sometimes and speaks loud from her heart. That obvious parental imperfection is what embarrasses some kids but I think it’s okay that she is impulsive.
If I had named myself I would have chosen ‘Clotho’ after the youngest sister of Atropos and Lachesis, the other two of the Three Fates in Greek mythology. Clotho was responsible for spinning the tread of life and chose when people were born. She controlled the lives of gods and mortals. She created the alphabet with Hermes and therefore, gave us the power of writing stories.
“Hi Mum.” Croaky.
Mum and I are both around 160 centimetres high but she seems higher because she is Mum. She is heavier than me by eight kilos because she is Mum but we are both slim. Her hair is greying but in her line of work and with her vanity, it varies from blonde to brown. She has an expanding wardrobe that chronicles the mainstream fashion trends of the last twenty years. She wears fifty percent of what she bought in the last year plus a couple of favourites from the years before. Layered, dark coloured and lightly patterned; it speaks of the gap between her claim on talent and her flippancy with exactitude. That makes her sanctimonious but she is not articulate or aware of the heart on her sleeve; unaware of how others see her. This earns her suspicion and respect.
Over the years I have watched her reflect. What might take someone else a few months of self-discovery and a revelation or two has for her, been a perpetual course of surreptitious moments standing on the edge of an abyss and seeing surrender as her only absolution when behind her is a mountain. Better to fall than to climb. Better that she was pushed than motivated. I have watched her in front of her mirror or preparing dinner or dressing, and muttering that she has no choice. She blames Dad, work, her mother, the economy and me.
Mum says things that don’t sound true. I wish she wouldn’t do that. I mean, I still believe her but not for long these days. So we both live in fantasy worlds. She uses my idiosyncrasies as an excuse for her distortions and I forgive her for them.
I am strong and she is weak. Therefore, we have something to offer each other. She gets anxious and she gets dejected and she gets prescriptions filled. I wouldn’t touch drugs even if they came in the form of romance.
Mum is attractive, variable and simple. She is not secure, independent or intellectual. Mum and I are mostly defined by the weaning. She is relinquishing me to myself and feeling ambivalent. Her heart says one thing and her mind, another.

Best friend: Probably Mum because I get maternity too. I confess this is a biased perspective given my abridged social circumstances. Had I been more outgoing she would still have won the ‘Best Mum’ category but not the ‘Best Friend’.
Mum knows the password to my laptop and she’s allowed to read everything I write.

The moments of transition after we wake are longer than we realise. We leave sleep immediately but for a while we accommodate the day and settle our dreams. This morning I am aware again, of the pressure of being a guru. But my stable home environment and group of friends is the best insurance against the degradation into drugs, alcohol and torrid affairs that destroy so many of us that can’t handle the limelight. A true superstar is a superstar for life, unlike a shooting star.
I have to accept the assistance of my staff to attend my diary and complex routine out of respect for the skills that I simply don’t have in my rarefied existence. I work closely with Toppy, my mentor and man in waiting. His conservative and confident advocacy springs from an extraordinary personality type that on another planet would be the stuff of high station.
We have a process to efficiently prepare for the day ahead. First and foremost is fan mail. My people read it to me while I dress to The Beatles ‘White Album’ and then I dictate my reply. A letter to me might be,
“Dear Prudence, I have just put down your book again and while I catch my breath, I am penning this thank you. Thank you for giving me the structure that was missing. With your blueprint I can compile the pieces of me and my values. If you are like your words, you must be beautiful. Admiringly yours, Vicki.”
Many letters standardised so the staff will recommend a reply in our shorthand talk to save time. If it’s Raphael doing the reading he might ask me, “You are the power?” He is asking if we should send her something to consolidate the power of a life model in her hands and take away the assignment of her guidance from me. It’s not that I can’t handle the adulation but that she must transfer its ownership to herself to truly take advantage of it. So we’d reply,
“Vicki, If you get it you own it. See me only as a messenger of an idea. If you want to return me the favour, use the model in service to your health, your career and your community. Gratefully, Prudence.”
I get about ten letters a day and have them dealt with in about fifteen minutes. They all start ‘Dear Prudence’ like The Beatles song about Prudence Farrow who went to that ashram in India with them and got totally into it; like reclusive. Lennon got the job of getting her to come on out and socialise so he wrote the song. “… won’t you come out to play…open up your eyes … see the sunny skies … you are part of everything …”, you know, reminding her that it’s OK outside; like snap out of it. Apparently Lennon reckoned she was trying to reach God quicker than anyone else. Ridiculous really but you know, I get reminded of her.
“My turn to do breakfast Love. Anything you particularly fancy on this supercalifragilisticexpialidocious day?” Mum was tired; I guess a night with her friends. She pretty much always prepares the meals but calls it her turn to encourage me to take one sometime.
“Umm, juice, fruit and green tea please. And Vegemite on that nut bread!” She’ll use butter without me asking.
It was Saturday and I needed a clear mind to review my presentation. Mum likes to work on Saturdays. She is a part-time researcher for a cool industrial design company. After breakfast she goes off to the library until five o’clock closing. Her occupation creates a good environment for mine.
“Comin’ up Boss!”
Dad is enigmatic, in a nice way. I can’t describe him very well but he is like, interesting and edge conventional. We are as close as rare communication affords. He plays string instruments with a popular local band and spends his time travelling to country towns to play at concerts, school socials, weddings and anywhere they want to hear country and rock. He’s a happy loner and he writes songs. That creates a good vibe for my work.
I am much loved; loved by so many. I am loved more than I love and it’s an imposition. Of course love is useful in its unconditional form but inevitably it comes with an IOU and I won’t sign them.
Love is one of pain’s favourite disguises, and one of its most convincing.
I have friends and I love them. In that direction, love is less threatening. Funny bunch they are; make me laugh, stimulate me, care about me and give me someones to give my giving to. But I don’t rust onto anyone because I don’t care for the obligatory argument and distance; the ironies that define intimacy. Not for me.
There is much to be said for retreat. The loudest you can say ‘leave me alone’ is to be silent.
Friends are best imagined. Real ones are only for filling in the bits of you that are missing. Holes in our personality beget an assault on the attention of others. Fill your own holes.
Loneliness? As if! I have a companion called Tiffany. I’ve known her for as long as I can remember. She made herself known to me when I was little and it’s always been a relaxed friendship but I’m not certain if we respect each other mutually. The nature of our relationship obviates my concern for that. She is clever; a mind that has the capacity and desire to make silk purses out of pigs’ ears. Tiffany is a ghost but there is nothing weird about her … or us. Ghosts are real. Believing or not believing in them has no bearing on their being. You can’t have a total relationship with them of course, but there is a lot of ground you can cover.
Roll out of bed onto all fours and crawl over to CD. Press ‘PLAY’. Preset on ‘Diamond Dogs’ by David Bowie and I slowly rise to my feet and get into a callisthenic dance until I am sweaty and puffed. Cold shower and look blankly at my body in the mirror because I want to stay in touch with it. It is a temple, not the sacrificial lamb. I’m more of the temple guard. Into the light-blue brushed cotton bathrobe Dad brought me back from a trip. I didn’t see him that time. He came in late and left early while I slept. I felt his kiss on my forehead and he whispered, “Dad is happy”.
He left for the first time in the dark of the winter morning of my ninth birthday. He slid a cardboard box of his CDs under my bed. Through my sleepy eyes I saw his helpless eyes and brimming with integrity he said, “Aufwiedersehen”.
Mum occasionally adds a CD to my collection and they stack against Dad’s retro stuff in the cardboard box.
Our house is basic, overstocked, underutilised, clean on the surfaces and maintained by a meagre budget. It is a memorial to the full dress rehearsal my parents made of marriage. Three bed and one bath of world to me.
My bedroom is best described as a loop where the organised tidy person I have become meets my parents’ excitement at my birth. During my gestation, Mum and Dad spent spare hours and borrowed money renovating my room. All six planes of the hexahedron were stripped back, restored and sealed. In the week after my birth while Mum recovered in hospital, Dad coloured the surfaces in accordance with my gender: in feminine pastels and less thematically, spaceship stencils. Curtains, linens and haberdashery had been preselected for both a boy and a girl so were only a matter of taking out of lay-by. The furniture was purchased at garage sales and was gender neutral except for a chair that Dad spray painted in hot pink, jarring with the orange upholstered seat. The single bed was the handiwork of a home joiner. It is made of jarrah and is very heavy.
Over the years from infancy to adolescence, tides of plastic toys, gadgets, clothing, books and paraphernalia came and went with a net gain in clutter. In my late adolescence as I became conscious of my character as not defined by my parents’ compromises, I noticed the claustrophobia from the flotsam on an incoming tide and joy in the ebbing tides of melange. With each piece of neglected debris I removed I felt an improvement in mental lucidity and peace. I prefer to do without.
Our neighbourhood is a quiet one except for the occasional hooligan who is creatively challenged. Skid marks on the community underpants. I will never marry a hoon.
The surfaces of my room have remained the same since the day I arrived home from the King Henry Women’s’ Hospital except for the chips and abrasions that express themselves less elegantly on applied surfaces than on natural materials. This is testimony to the withdrawal of parents as their child expresses beliefs and independence. Their welling indifference is more precisely, emotional survival and the innate realignment with their life path. The last thing they relinquish is the role of oracle.
The furniture has moved around the room over time and the clothing has kept track of fashion inside the frontline. The shelves are now filled with my reference library that propounds similar philosophies to the children’s stories that once adorned them. The anthology is skewed towards biology, aesthetics, landscape architecture, classic poetry, witchcraft, Aboriginals, scissors and classic novels bookmarked with torn strips of coloured paper. And my German-English dictionary that was Dad’s. I also kept my Bible and analyse bits of it to abate brain atrophy.
A study desk ousted my toy community collection that introduced me to the fascinating diversity of human nature and relationship dynamics. We kept the Little People and some animals for company but Mum sold the Lego farm yards and houses that were their home. Gone are most of the animals that were their pets. I feel guilty about that. I remember enjoying the purging of my childhood props but now that I have learned responsibility, I care for twenty-three Little People orphans. I do this by showing respect for their opinions.
There are three photos taken when I was eight at Mr Littleheart’s studio: me with Dad, me with Mum and me by myself. The backdrop is a creased blue grey curtain and only I am looking into the camera.
The waxing and waning of inventory survives the incompatibility of my parents. Dad preferred empty spaces housing only objects he could step back and regard, or imagine. His spatial austerity defined his lifestyle. Mum prefers layering and consumption. She is undermined by restraint and comforted by juxtaposition.
Today the room is as uncluttered as the day I, in my lacquered cane bassinet, was caringly placed on the single bed. This deterministic ambience somehow perpetuates my apathy to adventure.
When I was eight I used to think while I showered, that Mum and Dad in the other rooms were aliens. When I came out of the shower they were real again.
Over breakfast we are quiet. We both dream deeply during the dawn hour and spend the first woken hour in a trance, or defragmenting if we are in real company. Mum and I have it down pat.
“Did you get your vitamin D?” Mum stared at her nut bread toast unable to sustain the opening energy of her day. She does that under a spell to start the day positive; that I might come to and get a life. It was kindness; the kind that wants more than it offers.
“Not yet but I will.” I must have said that a thousand times. So she must have asked it as many times. I did care for my health. It was as if there was some great purpose for me; something preternatural, transcendental. My north facing window gave me plenty of time to bear my arms and décolletage to the nourishment of sunshine.
For the last year or so, with my arms draped over my window sill and my chin planted between them, I watched a middle-aged man across the street in his front yard, rehearsing waltz moves by himself. He always dressed in dark baggy dress trousers and a white short-sleeved shirt. He wears black leather brogues that scrape and glide between the front path and his porch. Occasionally he flicks back his fringe and executes a flurry of turns and promenades. I wondered who he was holding. Was it a particular lady in his dance class or did he just want to be admired by them all for his grace and steamy hubris?
Mum told me that opposite twinkle toes’ place, on the other side of the T-junction opposite our house, live a deaf and blind couple. I have never seen them but I play out their conversations in my mind. I resolved that he tells her long stories about historical heroes and she replies by dancing traditional Middle Eastern dances.
Their street slopes away from our house so we are on the higher ground.
Mum drinks coffee and I don’t. She ignites. Her synapses conduct dry until her knowledge repository opens at nine-thirty. The J-shape of her morning exposé concludes with a kiss on my forehead and her dizzy attention to dishes and departure.

On sex: First of all, take it seriously. It’s like war. In war, you don’t win; you survive. Love and war make the world go around and we will never know the end of either of them. Like Plato said, ‘Only the dead know the end of war.’ Tiffany says, ‘Only the dead know the end of love.’ The upper hand to surviving in war is to be more serious than your foe. In sex, to survive you have to be serious about giving more than you get. Relationship ascendancy is survival.
Second, and like a wound, sex cuts you open and you ooze. You lose your endurance. And rushing in like white corpuscles is the hope of healing. In the atmosphere, like bacteria that will have you festering, is guilt.
Third is the look of your lover. Like with fashion, we are excited about each new cool thing but what looks nice is changeable. Better the man is a magnum opus? Why? Nothing is proven like a classic, with all the good and bad about that. And judging a model boyfriend is like evaluating a vintage.
Forth, take away the hackneyed nexus between love and sex and see their dysfunctional arrangement for what it is: the squabble for admiration. They don’t just fulfil each other like the blades per se.
On a pair of scissors from the third-century BC, male and female figures in different coloured inlaid metals complement each other on the bronze blades.
Which leads me to fifth; sex is dirty. Dirty things that feel good can be made look glorious so we don’t have to confront the filth. Alcohol kills and messes up minds and lives but we sell it as good fun, tradition, craft and a natural part of life. We pitch creamy, salty food as fine dining while it lines our arteries with plaque, and tattoos are ancient ritual or individualism now rather than vandalism of our skin. Sex is the same; it is for breeding but misguidance makes it something special. It is the spin of a world of dirty people who exalt it to excuse themselves.
It’s way not that I am bitter, no way. Some of us are liberated by dismantling myths. And for that matter, the same of us might perpetuate constructive myths. But the whole dating scene; the whole multi-billion dollar industry: only good for the economy. If matters of survival weren’t artificially promoted by governments and capitalism, we would not be so bored and we wouldn’t use sexual relationships as entertainment. We sure wouldn’t have invented the concept of love the same way we invented advertising for everything else that is bad for us and good for entrepreneurs: pushers.
Sex doesn’t belong in love songs and saccharine movies but rather, in science journals. Like, ‘recent studies show that women become more flirtatious and provocative during their monthly peak fertility’. And, ‘men find a women’s scent more arousing during the same period and produce more testosterone’. The trouble is, we aren’t in touch with the subconscious, until we are challenged by it. Studies by Dr Blah Blah from the University of Blah Blah showed that married men, or more materially, committed men, rated women as less attractive during ovulation. Mind over matter. Warding off temptation. Protecting themselves. The hollowness of love.
In order to civilise the world so it better suited those who had more to lose from common man living like an actual animal, the power deluded invented sewerage systems and marriage, promoted under the auspices of physical and spiritual health respectively. The former was to raise the value of urban land and the latter to raise the value of sex. Sex became a licensed privilege. Funny thing is, sewage disposal was widely embraced but qualified sex is still only a despotic pipedream, respected occasionally by those who have a fear of God or their partner. Imagine that: I love therefore I fear.
And women are most to blame. Men are more in touch with their instinct although this is purely relative to women, not to enlightenment. John Blah Blah, social critic and author, in his book Blah Blah, said women are more attracted to men when they are unsure if their own feelings are being reciprocated.
While women are expending valuable energy fretting over the loyalty of a love interest they concurrently assume that if they think a lot about him they must love him. Go figure.
Dr Mary Blah Blah from the University of Blah Blah concluded in her study of pigs that the desirability gene is recessive. If he is sexy to you, he is probably not a sound proposition.
So are we to be a part of the great brainwashed or can we question the conventions of mating? If we live our life never questioning, indeed never purposefully changing the way we do things then we are no more than the ironically deliberate and determined five monkeys that wouldn’t reach for the banana.
Tiffany says that you learn from a relationship if the man abstains from heavy petting and sex. You can better judge a man by how he handles asceticism and we discover more about ourselves by other things together. She says the man who enjoys the company of a woman or man more than he enjoys sex, gives us hope for the future. Playboys use the guise of love precept and the vulnerability of the addicted to satisfy doped-up power surges. Tiffany makes sense to me because you can’t delete a sexual encounter but you can imagine one.
It’s really where you put sex in your instinct. Or more plausibly, where sex is put for you because instinct is one of those things we have little say over. For some, actual sexual encounter is a key performance indicator and for others like Tiff and me, it is down the list.

For the time being, my cavalier is James ‘Bond’. I only say that to myself about him because it highlights his shortcomings. It’s sarcastic. Sharing a laugh can happen when one party doesn’t know it’s sharing. James is slim with an impression of himself as charming. My friends say he is but sometimes friends can be so cruel when they put my feelings before their honesty. Feelings I don’t even have! You are never more aware of feelings as when you don’t have them.
I’m with James out of habit and loyalty, and the fear that I won’t do better. I sort of want him to spend more time with me, shift more of his clothes in and stay over; to intensify the relationship and get closer so we can overcome our incompatibility. It’s just wonder if you can kick-start something if you pretend it hard enough. So far, so wrong. I could never marry him if it meant I had to wash his hankies.
I stay with him because for most of us, what we know and what we do are not the same. He is a flirt and a try hard. Low on IQ but motivated by his self image and the social response it gets; like a salesman. His business card says ‘Project Facilitator’ and his clients are mental quadriplegics. He is high on confidence, low on talent. Opposite me. Complementary me. Supplementary me. Bores me.
Our pivot screw is cross threaded. Most redeeming thing about him is his collection of burnt match heads that look like funny peoples’ heads if you look at them through a magnifying glass. Second most redeeming thing is that he is just in my imagination.
He dresses in mainstream inexpensive fashion gear, and writes me poems that are like cold showers. He wears his collars turned up. But he is vulnerable like paper is to scissors and I like the self-esteem that relationship power brings. But I don’t like it when that is all there is.
Courtship is like musical chairs. Indeed, so much of what we have is because we grabbed it fast when the music stopped. I sat on my boyfriends’ laps when the nursery rhymes of my childhood stopped playing. Now I know that you can get carried away with the game rather than appreciate the silence and the standing up.
Before James, two others. The first was a thin boy I dated and lost my virginity to during my late onset adolescence and in defiance of my mother. In retrospect, I was just his convenience for that adventurous selfish part of his life. He told me enough sweet things to get me, or I heard what I wanted to hear, then he found another girl while he was high on the discovery of how easily women fall for adoring prose.
I had asked him to shift in with me because I am weak to nest building. Mum said it was okay because I think she was glad I had company but I wish she had made at least one more smart decision on my behalf by discouraging him away.
The second was a short romance. I am to blame for that one too. I was another easy threshold to cross for a man whose confusion I mistook for intellect. I have an unfortunate tendency for the stupid types; my imagination abides their hopelessness. My hankering for a well spent life eludes the profanity of their deceit. It was also peer pressure that made it easier for me to welcome him into my bed. He had a lovely English accent and I was open to exotica. He used me. I came to and left, against my other instinct to stay and make it work.
An actress has to shift her alliances, abandonment and ardour from movie to movie.
If my life was a movie, the sets would be low budget and the supporting roles wouldn’t be nominated for Oscars. Cult, fringe, alternative.

So I rearrange the furniture in my room; push the bed back and make a lectern out of boxes and an atlas. I make an audience out of the Little People: short hair woman I call Candi, red-body lady I call Mum, the white-scarf farmer I call Dad, the babies I call Julie-Lotus and May-Wattle, orange-body policeman, red-scarf cowboy, top hat man I call Toppy, blue-hat workman I call Raphael, two clowns Mum named Sad and Lonely, some more girls and boys; two that are headless, pony with front legs on backwards I call Ropo, a lion, a hippopotamus, a cow, a sheep and a monkey, in rows on my desk and address them. They are the old ladies at the Penguin Club.
“Good afternoon and thank you very much for the opportunity to engage your imagination for the next forty-five minutes. I am Prudence ‘Clotho’, surname Burke like the explorer that met death at the hands of his own obsession.
Some of you will be engage immediately; the flow of ideas, concepts and perspectives will flow easily between us because the conduit to your mind will be wide open. For others, the experience will be more fraudulent and concocted. And for others still, it will be intimidating and you will defend the shortcomings of your inventiveness with an attack on the empyrean, made vulnerable by an imagination-challenged society. 
Today I want to tell you a bit about scissors.

SLIDE 1
“By way of introduction, I believe that the two scissors, double-X chromosome is not to blame for the abuse of imagination. Us women didn’t procure nuclear arms and left to our own devices, wouldn’t have used imagination in the service of evil. It is entirely our weakness for men that sustains our criminal meme. And it is entirely the muliebrous meme in men that allows them to constructively visualise.”

SLIDE 2
“I have to acknowledge my research team; my mother and my friend Tiffany. Mum is a research officer with Indigo Industrial and Tiffany is a ghost who died of pneumonia in 1957. If you don’t believe in ghosts because your education and peers have overly rationalised your female wisdom then please, for the next three quarters of an hour, give them the benefit of the doubt.
This really is a picture of the spot where Tiffany was when I took the photo. It is funny … when I take her photo we look at the empty space and she says how terrible she looks or how I have caught her bad side. And we laugh. Her language is old fashioned like a Grandma; like you guys.”

SLIDE 3
“Shears are generally larger and/or used on tougher material than scissors. Same divine principles.”

SLIDE 4
“A potted history if I may.
The earliest scissors we know of were spring scissors and appeared in Mesopotamia about three and a half thousand years ago. They consisted of two bronze blades connected by a curved strip of bronze that was the spring of the open close action. Steel shears like this are used to shear sheep.
Egyptian bronze shears from the third-century B.C., a unique object of art showing Greek influence although with decoration characteristics of Nile culture, the shears are illustrative of the high degree of craftsmanship which developed in the period following Alexander's conquest of Egypt.  Decorative male and female figures complementing each other on each blade are formed by solid pieces of metal of a different colour inlaid in the bronze shears.”

SLIDE 5
“During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, spring scissors were made by heating a bar of iron or steel then flattening it into blades on an anvil.”

SLIDE 6
“Pivoted scissors of bronze or iron turned up in ancient Rome around AD100. Pivots came about at the same time in scissor development as love came about in human civilisation but about 1000 years apart!
They were not manufactured in large numbers until 1761, when good ol’ Robert Hinchliffe of Sheffield used cast steel to make them.”

SLIDE 7
“During the nineteenth-century, elaborately decorated scissors were hand-forged then hammered on indented surfaces known as ‘bosses’ to form the blades. The finger and thumb holes were made by punching a hole in the steel and enlarging it over the pointy end of an anvil.”

SLIDE 8
“By the nineteen-hundreds, scissors were simplified for mechanized production. They were formed by heavy drop hammers powered by steam that used dies to shape the scissors from bars of steel. Modern drop hammers are still used to make scissors.
It’s cursory to be so fundamental about the craft of scissor making when there is cold stamping, drop forging, moulding, hardening, grinding, polishing, plating …let alone the strict quality control. Scissors and life are enhanced with quality control.”

SLIDE 9
“The singular for scissors is ‘scissor’ or ‘blade’. We only know them as a pair. A scissor is significantly compromised without a pair. That makes them so pathetic, I love them. And that is really why we love each other.”

SLIDE 10
“So let’s have a look at the parts of scissors before I start explaining how useful they can be in modelling our life. I’ll start with the two big pieces, the finger blade and the thumb blade.
So this is the finger hole and this, the thumb hole. This section between the holes and the pivot are called shanks. Scissors can be referred to as ‘offset’ meaning one shank is longer than the other or ‘handled’ meaning the shanks are equal in length.
Ahh, the rivet screw… or pivot screw. A beautiful word is ‘pivot’, and a beautiful thing. Talk about the perfect example of why scissors reflect life; the pivot concept is used in maths, linguistics, sport, finance, equipment, computing, dance and of course, physics. The pivot is well… pivotal, and its contribution to the scissors is to accord them purpose and torque.
Inner blade, outer blade, cutting edge, ride line, point, spine and half moon.          
These are the generic terms for the basic parts of scissors. Be assured, the scissor discipline is however, extensive.”

SLIDE 11
“Scissor types. This can do your head in. I have tried to construct a taxonomy of scissors a number of times and still come undone after a couple of days.
Mum has researched a number of taxonomic structures for me but the one we get the best is the Linaean system of biological classification under Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species.
Take this pair of offset cutter slicers. Do they belong to the domain ‘Non Living’ and the kingdom ‘Metalica’? Is that their broadest category? Is their phylum ‘Pivot’ or is it ‘Torque’ and ‘Pivot’ is the class? Every pivot creates torque but not all torque is made by pivots. Does their offset form decide that they are of the order ‘Offset’? family ‘Hairdress’? Could the genus be ‘Cutter’? Species ‘slicer’? I guess that sounds okay but the real challenge is to put every pair of scissors into the system, and then translate it to Latin!
There are as many scissor and shear types as there are stars in the sky; bone, general purpose, thinning, garden, trauma, pinking, ceremonial … to infinity and beyond.”

The last time I went outside was with Tiffany when I was eight. I had been counting stars from my window since Dad did it with me to help me sleep. At that time the head of my bed was closer to the window. At night I tilted my head back and stared through the window at the night sky. The eaves and the streetscape framed a sky full of stars when the moon was new. I had my first period on a new moon when I was fourteen-years old.
I would start from the west and count my way across. Stars came and went, changing colour, blinking or shining steady. I got to different totals less than four hundred. Each time I believed I had it right.
One evening, Tiffany reckoned I was ready to count the whole hemisphere. We climbed through my window and stood on the lawn with our heads inclined to the sky. After an hour of hopeless and frustrating counting I came to appreciate the enormity of the outside and that if one is to make any sense of the world, one should limit its scope and have influence over its form.

Dinner
If I have friends over for dinner Mum always says she has to go out. It makes her happy that I socialise and she cooks something for us but as my friends arrive, she can get teary. Crying is important; crying and laughing are the blades.
Last week I made invitations out of letters I cut from coloured paper that I glued onto cereal box cardboard. It took me so long but they looked great; one each for Dmitry, Valdimir, Flora and Dianne. James I just told. Any more than five guests and it gets hard to have a single conversation at the table. Mum put addresses on the envelopes and posted them for me. She said everyone accepted.
I usually take a couple of hours getting myself ready for a dinner party. I apply a masque and select my clothes and all the while I think about who is coming and how I will optimise my engagement with each of them.
Dianne
How do I depict her? She is sullen but content. Dianne doesn’t talk much and when she does, it’s moody. It’s like she doesn’t know much but she knows deep. She likes the smell of paper. Valdimir is her long suffering husband.
She is in both of our imaginations but I am one step further removed than Valdimir; I imagine her as being inside my imagination.
I’ll never forget the day Valdimir had to go and get her from outside the library where she was nearly starkers in front of the exhaust. I see her like that.
Valdimir
What a dreamer. It doesn’t matter what Dianne does, he will think she is wonderful. He is a bus driver and is really into it. Valdimir is quite handsome and dresses very neatly. We both have a vivid imagination and sometimes on the phone we make things up for hours.
Valdimir is writing a story about a torturer and a prostitute. He visits me and reads the story to me, sitting outside my window and leaning against the wall. I picture him like that.
Flora
Tough lady. Talented lady. She intimidates Dmitry. It’s a love-hate thing of some sort. He respects how she designs landscape and wants that to be all there is about her, but she is complex and scattered and he can’t put her into a box.
She is crazy in a way I can deal with but not everyone can. She drinks, did some pot and had a few lovers for sure including her lecturer who was murdered. The cops suspected her of it but she hasn’t said anything to me about it. She is very close to her sister.
I see her in khaki shorts and a white cheesecloth shirt; looking angry.
Dmitry
A scientist I’m afraid: a dendrologist to be precise. He can commune with trees so he says but he can’t turn their message into creative thought or product. He is genuine and I love that. When we talk he hides his feeling of inadequacy.
He tells me about his family and he loves them but he is a black sheep; or maybe not. Who knows with these things?
Dmitry’s got a job up north. Good for him. He’s so bad at promoting himself but the government can accommodate people like that. It will do him good to get away for a while and meet new people.
I picture him with a notebook and samples.

None of these couples are much of a role model for me. But I’m mature enough to know that they are as good as one can expect.
James
He’s not perfect. What annoys me is that I can accept that no relationship is perfect but I would like mine to be.
We saved for a trip to Paris and spent a week living in an apartment on the Left Bank. We ate pastries with hot chocolate in big cups without handles and strolled for hours through jardines and rues. We drank champagne with a baguette and cheese until we got tipsy and laughed our way back to the flat. That was on the first day. I had my period for the next few days and James got surly with me that he spent all his hard-earned on a trip to Paris and he couldn’t have sex with me. I won’t have sex with James while I’m menstruating. I haven’t ever really enjoyed sex with him.
We went to Bali and slept on futons in a timber and frond shelter by the beach. James thought it was better that he used the thicker futon because he has a heart condition.
In the library, we grid our way through the collection taking bearings on each other as we scroll up and down the Dewey decimals. In the park outside, painted brides adopt fuck-me-but-treat-me-with-admiration poses while their new husbands work on paternalistic decency. Friends, family, God and the public bear witness to their claims to fairest and best on ground.
All the time James is oblivious to milieu and meaning.
He is an amateur photographer with a family money safety net that his dad is tight with. He is nevertheless careless with anything he earns from shooting the occasional special occasion for friends and relatives. His credit card experiences weight fluctuations like a middle-class housewife as it binges on photographic equipment and his mother relieves it lest he gets a bad credit record.
He is the companion you have when you don’t have a companion. He is more transparent than a lover. A lover must be deceitful and charming in order to lionize the sex he would rather have quickly and on demand. And the woman must exude scent. We don’t. We are androgynous.
I picture James as a mistake; brown, limp and foolish.
Prudence
The face of a pixie adorned with a petite nose and ample rosy lips. I self-cut my intractable mousy-blonde hair short and it reveals the fine neck of a model like Twiggy. My skin is pale and clear since it sees only reflected sunlight. My pretty green eyes are fathomless and my face is absorbing by contour and compelling by composition. I am lithe and my body is sculpted by my benign travails. I clothe it in comfortable attire but am never happy that I have matched what I wear with my personality or mood.
I wear reading glasses that I chose from a catalogue Mum brought home: black frame, classic shape and large for my face.
I have surrendered to the oppression of imagination out of self-preservation. I think nothing evil and I think in configurations.
The time of day usually passes me unless I pass it.
I see myself as a beautiful constellation of peculiar features, and evolved.

Mirror Mirror          
As a younger girl, I would spend up to an hour each day in front of Mum’s full-length freestanding mirror that leans against the wall of her bedroom. Mum said it made the room feel bigger. I had plenty of time alone to examine the geometry of my reflected body. I drew on my naked limbs with Mum’s blunt eye-liner pencil and adopted distorted poses so as I stretched and bent the warp and weft of the lines were highlighted against my fair skin.
I studied the dynamic section through my skeleton to my epidermis in yellow oblique light that threw shadows of my terrain across my terrain and opened doors to the inner sanctum of self-realisation.