HABITUS LIVING ONLINE: LIVING BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT

HABITUS LIVING ONLINE: LIVING IN A KALEIDOSCOPE OF LIGHT

HABITUS LIVING ONLINE: DESIGNING LA DOLCE VITA THROUGH ART

ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI’S WOMEN

Beheading of Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi

My mother gifted me a coffee table book, ‘Great Women Artists’. Each page a key work alongside a snippet about an artist’s life and oeuvre. A gory image of two women bracing themselves over a man they held down on a bed. One seemed to come over the top of him, pinning him down at the torso, while the other, eyebrows furrowed perhaps in both rage and concentration, was beheading the man with a large sword. The image is expressive and forceful, the painting precise. This is Judith (with her maid servant) beheading Holofernes. The artist was Artemisia Gentileschi. 

Gentileschi (1593 – circa 1662) was an Italian Baroque painter. Her style, in its tenebrism, was influenced by Caravaggio, though her depictions are thought to exceed his in their naturalistic quality. She had a 40-year career at a time when female artists were scarce, and those taking on the ‘important’ subjects, like biblical and historical scenes, even more so. Yet Gentileschi, having trained with her father, had not only the skill to compete with her male counterparts, but in her depictions of women, she uniquely painted with insight, gusto and authenticity. Of her 57 well-known and attributed works, 49 feature a strong female protagonist, often in a moment of tension, hesitation or decision.

When she was 17 her father hired an artist, Agostini Tassi, to teach her drawing and perspective. Tassi came with a reputation of sexual aggressiveness and violence, so it’s odd that a father would invite him into his daughter’s life. Though Tassi’s potentially profitable connections such as Pope Paul V might explain Ozario Gentileschi’s incentive. Tassi raped Gentileschi. Seventeenth century law considered rape a matter that centred on whether virginity had been taken away. Even then, the seriousness of the crime was less about concern for the woman as it was for the depreciated monetary value she would be worth when being married off. So, Gentileschi’s father took Tassi to court and Gentileschi was tortured with thumbscrews when giving her testimony to discern truthfulness. She maintained her graphic version of events which have been preserved in the trial records that were exhibited at the National Gallery in London in 2020. This wasn’t the only trial she endured, she also lost two of her son’s during her life and her father and brothers are said to have been harsh with her. Gentileschi herself was also said to be violent. For instance, when a servant asked for payment, she and her husband beat him severely.   

Whether or not her life’s challenges influenced her work is debated, especially in reference to her violent depiction Judith Beheading Holofernes. Holofernes was a general known for sexual violence, so some consider that she took revenge on Tassi through this work. As Siri Hustvedt notes in her essay A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, ‘How can art come from anything but life? The dead don’t make it.’ I’m not sure that Gentileschi used her art purely as a vessel for this rage, but rather as a resilient woman, perhaps she intended to depict women with a will of their own - women of the biblical stories as deliberate, calculating and determined in their actions with courage. Not the nonchalant puppets to a higher power that previously had been depicted. In Judith Beheading Holofernes the maid is participating, unique to Gentileschi’s interpretation, the women work in a kind of solidarity. Their sleeves are rolled up exposing strong arms and the process of beheading is labourious. The lines of the limbs draw the eye into the centre of the deed. 

Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, Artemisia Gentileshi

While women are often naked in Baroque and Renaissance works, Gentileschi reveals more about her protagonists in the way she has covered them. Works like Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy and Lucretia, pierce a window into the mind of the subject. In Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy the eroticism comes through in her tensed posture, contorted neck as her head throws back, the consumed facial expression. Her top may be about to slip from her shoulder, but it’s not required to convey a pool of electric bliss. Lucretia, a Roman heroine who was married, then captured and raped, kills herself to save her family from dishonour. Gentileschi’s version shows the moment as Lucretia is deciding whether or not to go through with it. Lucretia’s form is strong, she clutches her breast deliberately with one hand, a knife in the other. Her leg and decolletage only are revealed. With a severe expression she gazes above. It seems as though the questions of dishonour, power and will over oneself and body are more important to Gentileschi as the cause of the moment, than the act of suicide - the consequence. 

Lucretia, Artemisia Gentileschi

Her talent was recognised and she was the first woman invited to the Academia del Disegno. This meant she could buy her own supplies and sign her own contracts without the permission of her husband. It meant independence. She was also awarded a commission to paint an altar which was symbolic of her reaching the pinnacle of a male-dominated mountain. Painting an altar meant she was considered a great artist worthy of painting for the most important and impressionable audience – the public.

Gentileschi did something different with her art, she conveyed women as they really were, not in the idealised form they were meant to aspire to. Her works didn’t simply depict an action from a historical scene – rather her talent captured emotion, thought and the complexities of women.

Despite being a woman in a man’s world, Gentileschi’s storytelling held her in high esteem in her day. Then we forgot about her for 300 years. This is thought to be because many art history scholars were men, writing about men, for men. Gentileschi came back into the public eye around 1970 as feminism heightened. Just like reading a newspaper, looking at art requires keeping in mind whose lens one is looking through. Just as we interpret art individually, so does each artist interpret life. 

Gentileschi painted heroines of the bible and of history. She retold their stories with a new focus on the strength their actions would have required. Her works, rife with empathy, rage and power at a time when these women were often depicted tranquilly adorned with vacant expressions, as though posing - their courage act a pretence. Gentileschi made her protagonists actions real and their own, something new and visceral for the women of her day. 

Her works have been described as a kind of feminist rebellion. Maybe, but I think she also did something more powerful - she corrected. She took a red pen to the work that came before her, margin notes explaining that this is what a real woman looks like, how she thinks, how she feels and how powerful she can be. Her legacy then is perhaps not depicting a new kind of woman at that time, even if it was new for the art world, but showing honestly the way women had always been. 

In a documented letter from 1649 to a regular patron, Don Antonio Ruffo, she writes ‘With me your lordship you will not lose and you will find the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman…I’ll show you what a woman can do’ 

Though she apparently wrote these lines to justify her professional skill, each of her works seems to attest to her point - to show what a woman can do. Just as she was inspired by courageous historical heroines, perhaps she’s become one of them for the twenty-first century. 

Then again, this is just speculation, 

through a lens,

all of my own. 

HABITUS LIVING ONLINE: REDEFINED LINES AND LIVING WITH DOOD STUDIO

The Garden of Earthly Delights: A portrait of human avarice

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymous Bosch Panel 3 excerpt

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymous Bosch, Panel 3 excerpt

Five hundred years ago Hieronymous Bosch painted The Garden of Earthly Delights. A triptych with two exterior panels depicting the third day of creation (when The Garden of Eden came to be, according to the bible). The exterior panels are grey, grim and lifeless juxtaposing what lies inside. At a glance the three interior panels are playful and decorative like a child’s wistful fable of make believe. Upon closer inspection the gore of Bosch’s figures is unsettling. 

Sometimes human, sometimes animal, sometimes hybrid. Gnarly, gothic figures spear, decapitate, eat and pleasure each other. The shameful deterioration from paradise to hell is generally considered a religious warning to resist temptation. Dignity being the most precious thing that a human can lose. The first panel shows the angelic allure of desire, the middle a mystical orgy before the third gets simply hellish. Although the creatures are physically disturbing, most frightening (though unsurprising as Bosch is considered a precursor to the Surrealists) is the sense that this twisted imagery could be plucked from the psyche of today’s anxious nightmares.

A sense of infinite human folly is illustrated through compositional layering, not only across the triptych but also in the rolling hills fore to background, and in the prolific spattering of humans taking part. 

Christ looks directly at the viewer including them in the mayhem - you did this. 

Beyond a religious and sexual context, Bosch highlights the rippling butterfly effect of temptation and its subsequent destruction. Humans follow one after the other wreaking havoc. 

Because to err is the most human thing of all.

Bosch reveals the pitfalls of blindly following others, of wanting what they have and propelling a collective greed. This chaos of individualistic indulgence acts a mirror – as modern news outlets frequently remind us that we humans consume everything in our path. 

Consumers of the world rather than citizens,

Bosch insists that there is a cost,

Because nothing comes for free, 

Especially in paradise. 

HABITUS LIVING ONLINE: THE THIRD BY DALECKI DESIGN

HABITUS LIVING ONLINE: HOUSE JAMES BY BERRESFORD ARCHITECTURE

Zagara: A wistful scent on the cusp of jubilation

‘A garden for the blind.’ This is how Don Fabrizio Corbera, the Prince of Salina, describes his backyard. The Prince is the protagonist in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel, The Leopard. In this moment the Prince is surrounded by roses, magnolias, lemon myrtle, mint, and orange blossom wafts from a grove somewhere in the distance. The Prince’s stroll is a ruminative one, weighed down by overwhelming aromas and memories. Citrus notes remind him of having witnessed a fatally-wounded soldier use his last breaths to crawl into a lemon grove. Because in all its Sicilian beauty, The Leopard is set during a time of civil war and revolution. The nineteenth century, where the aristocracy will come to be replaced by new money. As the Prince brushes past Elysian scents, he is already nostalgic for that which has not, quite yet, been taken away.

I read this scene after spending an afternoon sniffing scents in a little shop-front. I came out with Santa Maria Novella’s Zagara Cologne. Opened in 1612, Santa Maria Novella is an Italian apothecary pharmacy specialising in complex fusions steeped in ancient remedies. Zagara is a Chypre-type fragrance where addictive floral citrus, jasmine, bergamot and blossom notes float in a fresh sweetness bound by woody oakmoss. The Prince’s Sicilian garden bottled in all its glory, complete with an ephemeral veil of melancholia.

HABITUS LIVING MAGAZINE #51: A PLACE TO CONGREGATE

About Time

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali

We lose it, manage it, save it, waste it, then wish we had more of it. Time has become a kind of slippery, anxiety inducing method of measuring life, constantly grappled with. Way back when, time passing was marked by natural cycles. The sun rose and set on a see-saw with the moon gently, informing wake and relax. Today, unless one is orbiting a blackhole or hanging out with Elon on Mars, the need to closely eye the time like a sad day-trader monitoring their stocks comes from an unhealthy and misguided impulse that something important will be missed. The opposite is true. Second by second, rung by rung, the day-to-day becomes a hamster wheel, incessantly running to the tune of iCalendar alerts. Although most of the world rely upon them, schedules are little prisons for impromptu opportunities.

In Netflix’s Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, Bill’s assistant remarks that despite his wealth and intellect, time is the one thing that Bill can’t accumulate more of. It’s the one thing that he must use as wisely as the rest of we plebs. Some say time is money – but this thought triggers a dubious little whisper, warning that a life led as such is a constant blackmailing of oneself. Although not monetary, time is a kind of currency for life and it’s inevitable that it will be spent. 

What is left after time? Memories. By examining memories one can measure the return on investment of a certain way of life. And value won’t be weighed according to one’s aptitude for time-management or efficiency. Unlike time, memories can be accumulated and if observed, the good ones inform how time should be invested in future. And when we die, it’s the warm memories created bit by bit with others that morph time past into tangible treasures that live on in others.

Albert Einstein said, ‘Time and space are modes by which we think, not conditions in which we live.’

Getting caught in the web of plans, routines and expectations is a choice, not something dictated by time itself. Time moulds to the parameters placed on it. 

A watch is aptly named for literally observing time pass by. Surely, there are better ways to own it. Better ways to fill a treasure chest.

MARION BORGELT - SILENT SYMPHONY

 SILENT SYMPHONY

At a time of quotidian angst, this suite of work offers escape and lends perspective. Silent Symphony alludes to nature's exquisite designs by referencing fundamental archetypal patterns and forms. The artist’s selection of different materials considers how their innate properties are best elevated to result in expressions of orbital motions about time and change.

Scale becomes enigmatic in the works; they may be viewed as though through a microscope’s lens upon the minute, yet are simultaneously suggestive of vast eternal rhythms and infinite symmetries trapped in a volution. These works give prominence to the meticulously engineered natural world and reveal its omnipresent melodies that generally escape the naked eye. By intersecting the realms of physics, mathematics, design and rhythm inherent in nature, this exhibition underlines the elementary connections of all things. 

Artist Statement by Caitlin Leishman. See more of Marion Borgelt’s work via her website.

The Nose: Nikoli Gogol

In his short story The Nose, Nikoli Gogol wrote that, ‘The world is full of the most outrageous nonsense.’ And it opens with nothing less than that. A barber is having breakfast with his nagging wife. The options are an onion, a bread roll or coffee. He is allowed to have some but not all, his wife insists, so he forgoes the coffee. As he slices into the roll, he realises a nose has been baked into it and recognises it as that of his esteemed client ‘The Major’. 

The Major is a ladder-climbing narcissist who, upon finding nothing but a flat fleshy plateau in the centre of his face that morning, instantly began to fear for his social status and potential loss of charm with married ladies. He darts around the city in a bid to locate his nose. When the Major finds his nose, Gogol narrates that ‘Even joy begins to fade after only a minute,’ as it dawns on the Major that he has no way to reattach his nose. A doctor explains that sticking it on is his only option – and it would look awful. The doctor insists he’s better off without it, life would be ok and he’d get used to it. But the Major’s ego can’t bear the thought, after all he has high hopes of growing his importance in his wealthy circles. 

Throughout his mission to return his nose to its rightful place, the Major’s misogyny becomes apparent. He passes beggarwomen that he usually laughs at due to their dress that only leaves their eyes visible. But he doesn’t laugh as he runs by them also covering up with a handkerchief to his face. At the City Security Department where he hopes to place an ad for his missing nose, the Major notices one by a 19-year-old girl who has laundry experience and is willing to do ‘other’ work. Later, in despair, he accuses Alexandra Podtochin (a statesman’s wife as he often repeats) of witchcraft as he believes she is taking revenge for him not marrying her daughter. The Major is also disrespectful to those he views as lower class, such as his threadbare barber who he insults constantly for being dirty with ‘stinky hands’. An aspiring statesman and wealthy governmental-like figure that acts with prejudice, insolence and idiocy, the Major seems to satirically shed light on Gogol’s views of an incompetent government leaving many of its people behind.  

The Nose develops its own personality and becomes even more stately than the Major himself. For that day, the Major is out-ranked by his own nose and a taste of what life could be like for those less fortunate. But any self-reflection the Major may have is fleeting – particularly once both his luck and nose are magically returned to him. 

In children’s film, Mary Poppins, Mr Banks is oblivious to his children and pre-occupied with only his own career. Mary Poppins explains to the children that ‘Sometimes a person we love, through no fault of his own, can’t see past the end of his nose.’ Gogol seems to have almost pondered this phrase literally (though in 1836 well before Mary Poppins) by taking the nose off the face of an ignorant being and extending the distance between a him and the end of his nose, thereby allowing more of the world to broaden his narrow view of it. This doesn’t work for the Major, maybe it was only meant for the reader…

This could also be a ridiculous link to make. After all, Gogol writes at the end of the story, in a conversation between reader and narrator, that such fantasies are useless and serve no one. Yet, he then doubles back a little, suggesting that there’s an absurd side to most things. 

Some might be tempted to contain absurd fantasy to the realm of children’s tales…but The Nose hints that a self-obsessed view of the world doesn’t discriminate. For adults, the absurd can open our eyes to the reality around us, that we also are missing.  

You'll have to speak up for Owen

Walking back to the car I came across an elderly man laying books on a blanket on the corner of Brunswick St. A few creative types hovered. The man would pick a book from his wheelie walker, consider it carefully categorising it in his mind, then take an age to shuffle to the right spot on the mat and crank his rickety knees down to position it just so. This strained choreography continued agonisingly. His efforts seemed risky with the air thick and rain threatening. Each book, one at a time.

As I closed in a musty scent reached me, old books. The man was thin and a tattered suit hung from him. His pants were loose around his disintegrating waist, belted to the extent that the fabric buckled, overlapping the way it does when men lose strength, muscle and beer belly. Pants reminiscent of a livelier self. His fly wasn’t done up, though I’m not sure that this was a wardrobe malfunction, rather I just don’t think these pants did that anymore. 

The skin on his face seemed a little alive; lumps and ravines morphing to their own agenda. His chin, forehead and nose thick as an elephant’s hide, yet only a veil of translucent skin held in his cheekbones. 

He wasn’t talking to anyone, just going about his cataloguing.

He pulled out a range of books and genres one by one. Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry, Brecht’s philosophy, Albert Camus in French, Calavino in Italian, were woven in amongst Shakespeare, Murakami, Orhan Pamuk, Primo Levi, Daphne De Maurier and physics guides. Cantilevering myself over the mat I surveyed this mini library of his mind. 

I picked up a book almost guiltily as I knew he’d have to find just the right substitute for the gap I’d left. Albert Camus – time revive my French. There wasn’t a lot of chatter and it was hard to navigate his purchasing system. I asked whether the books were for sale. Nothing. He just kept walking. I tried a woman nearby sitting on a bench flicking through a guide to Da Vinci’s art confidently. She responded matter-of-factly,

‘Yep, prices on the inside of the cover - but Owen is deaf – you’ll need to speak up!’

 I took Camus back to Owen and positioned myself squarely in his path; between wheelie walker and mat. 

I showed him the five dollars of coinage I’d scraped from the bottom of my bag and pointed to the grey lead $5 in the cover, offering to buy it. His brow gathered at its centre. 

‘It’s in French!’ he was quick to point out. I explained with exaggerated nods of my head that I was aware and keen to practice. He flicked his head to the side unconvinced, but took my dollars. 

After our odd transaction I hung about a little longer. I had a burning question. These books, all laid out, owned by this man who didn’t converse much, painted some kind of intimate portrait of who he might have been before he became too thin for his pants – so why was he offloading them?

Did he need money? Evidently. Or was he simply happy to cull some of his collection and share some knowledge? Maybe…Or was his health deteriorating like his attire? 

When one isn’t properly educated across languages, conversing with someone who is hearing impaired means doing so loudly, insensitively.

It wasn’t a question I could bring myself to ask in the middle of a busy Brunswick St. 

As I walked away, I flicked through the Camus I’d purchased and noticed penned English in a neat scrawl sporadically above obscure French. But the translations only lasted a few pages. Maybe Owen didn’t think I’d conquer Camus either.

HABITUS LIVING MAGAZINE #50: FINDING BALANCE

Etta: An antidote to anger

THE FIRE

Etta James’ voice leaves me breathless. But not in the usual way. Hers isn’t a voice that lifts you above the fray, into the clouds on honeyed lyrics. No.

Etta dives straight into the gut and stokes the embers that one has been trying to keep at bay. Embers that have been slowly burning away, distracting one’s capacity for joy. The crackling embers of rage. 

ETTA KNOWS

Etta was born Jamesetta Hawkins in 1938, her mother pregnant at fourteen. Etta never knew her father, he was a figure of rumours. She was raised by adored adoptive parents before her mother returned for her when Etta was 12. Her mother may have come back for her, but an only minimally present mother — sweeping in and out on the glamourous scent of midnight cologne — she perhaps left the lingering weight of abandonment, perhaps later, an understanding. A largely self-parented teenager, Etta navigated a music career, substance abuse and adulthood early. 

A mugshot might mark Etta’s arrests for drugs and bad cheques, yet a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame proves that celebrated glittery talent can exist hand-in-hand with long and twisted roots. Etta’s telling of life reiterates that we are more than one thing. The soul behind her indelible voice comes from lived experiences - both of fame and felony. 

I’d Rather Go Blind is a song about a woman who can’t bear to watch her lover leave her for someone else. It’s nostalgic and heart-breaking with a haunting veil of envy. She sings it with the desperate fury of someone familiar with the injustice of loving and having loved ones leave. Singing live at Montreux in 1975, as a 37-year-old, her face contorts, sweat ripples down her neck as she forcefully ejects the words with a possessed jerkiness, as though she’s a vessel for many angry voices. She plays to the audience. Bends down to them from the stage, meets their eyes, drawing them into a trance. She brings her microphone down to her hip, letting the power of her raw, unamplified voice directly meet its audience. In parts, she is a gravelly, Hendrix guitar vocalised. She will stop and start, using silence, letting her audience catch up to the meaning in her words. She pulls her collar up to ‘blind’ herself, because one can still be playful in anger. Thirty years on, she sings I’d Rather Go Blind again, backed by the band The Roots. She wears a red sparkly jumper. This time she doesn’t lean into the audience or energetically cross back and forth as she sings, rather she is seated on stage. Although age is physically catching up with her, her mind doesn’t appear at all weary. She scats lyrics with wit. The fire is still there in the light reflecting off her sparkly jumper, in the sweat glistening on her brow and in the tears in her eyes. 

Although I’d Rather Go Blind is a story of agony, she also sang with just as much heart about hope. When she sings At Last it’s as though an older couple is dancing in public. Their audience grows. The backing music stops and her voice alone moves them. They circle, roll out to their arm’s length, to the brink of separation, before they roll back into each other. The scene is like the aftermath of a drama, a lifetime together, when a marriage finds that in fact it could climb down off the rocks. 

Etta sings,

Oh and then the spell was cast

And here we are in Heaven

For you are mine

At last....

Her rendition of At Last suggests that enduring love isn’t always blissful with sun rays, but rather those are the ephemeral moments in between anger, forgiveness and mundane life. Which is ok, Etta seems to hint, because sometimes love also needs to be endured. 

Etta passed away in 2012 from leukaemia. A six-decade career that inspired the sound of other musicians we know, alongside a lifetime of battles with lovers, friends, the authorities, dementia and herself. Only someone who knows rage like this, the never-ending rolling hills of it, detailed in her autobiography Rage to Survive, can deliver music raw enough to make one recognise one’s own. During her life she was shamed for her rage, her outbursts — but in a way her anger could be considered a source of her music’s power, its visceral effect.

THE PURGE

Etta makes fury sound beautiful, enough that it fuels that angry fire in the belly, until the maelstrom of waves simply has to boil over. She forces this necessary emotional purge. In John Le Carré’s novel, The Tailor of Panama, a female character describes her own temperamental fury as ‘the tantrums that ran through me like conflicting impulses of hereditary electricity.’ It’s this kind of caged fury, reverberating around nerves, that Etta relieves by poking holes in dignity, so that these currents of energy might ride on the backs of tears out of the body. 

She sings,

Something deep down in my soul said “Cry girl”

Cry Cry

A PHOENIX

In my mind Tell Mama, a soulful album she recorded in the 1960s, transports me to a kitchen table, cupped hands prop up my head, a stiff drink nudges a resting elbow. Someone I trust listens to my grievances, taking a little of their weight. Etta’s songs hug the body like this, an angry hug that squeezes the last self-pitying thought out, provoking a kind of gentle exorcism– it’s this quality of her music that renders one breathless. 

At the end of Etta’s songs there’s a stillness left behind, after the anger has gone, like she’s gifted a pocket of silence that one can rest in for a moment, building resilience. 

When a melancholia won’t shift, the French call it ‘la vague à l’âme’ (my soul is in the waves). No therapy will replace this deep-rooted rage with strength, the way Etta can. 

This is a reflection on Etta James’ music, and how it reaches beyond the ears. Regarding her own life experiences and sentiments, I refer to candid recollections from her autobiography, Rage to Survive, 1995.

An invite to breakfast

As a nineteen-year-old in Paris I decided to visit the Porte de Clignancourt Market. Reviews insisted on starting at the crack of dawn to avoid market mayhem, and considering I was the only one of our travelling party with a flea market addiction, it was a solo mission. 

I got off the underground and found myself in a gloomy tunnel under an enormous bypass. A group of hooded teenagers were blocking my path ahead. Feeling edgy, I crossed over the road and walked on the heels of a German family. People with kids are meant to be safe right?

The suburbs of Paris aren’t quite as well-kept as the inner centre-ville. There’s a gritty resilience to the worn-out buildings. Hesitantly, I walked towards the only hint of market I could see, a stall with clothes hanging from its roof.  As I reached the stall the full hustle and bustle of the market revealed itself and engulfed me, as though I’d crossed an invisible threshold and been sucked into another world. I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to get a bit lost at some stage, and would have to awkwardly ask for directions, and thus the a-la local Parisian exterior that I’d worked so hard to mould would crumble. The labyrinth of stalls interwove infinitely like a surreal Escher drawing. Antiques and plush trinkets covered every surface. At the centre of the market was a little green structure with mezzanines and squashed little shelves of treasures. I was shopping in a life-sized dollhouse. 

At one of the thousand stalls I found a beautiful hand-made bag. I lifted the bag gently, waiting for the stall owner to come by so I could have a proper look, without appearing a thief. The owner came up to me and enquired whether I wanted to open the bag and check the lining. He was an attractive dark-haired 40-year-old man, who I imagined had an appreciation for the craft he was selling, and a lifetime spent in large workshops à la campagne, patiently making beautiful things with his hands - a genuine artisan. He was benevolent and patient with me, and I was enjoying practicing my French.

Then - he invited me to breakfast. 

He said he knew a place not far from here. It seemed like a kind, though perhaps loaded…offer. I also was confused as to why a businessman wanted to leave the stall just as the busiest part of the week was approaching. 

A woman stood a metre or so away from me, holding a bag. With a hard glare, her foot tapping and sporadic glances at her watch - it was clear that she was waiting expectantly to be served. Yet, the man paid her no attention. My vision of this handsome, kind, artisanal gentleman began to blur a little at the edges. Why wasn’t he trying to sell? The woman blurted out something to him in French and he replied in a terse tone - she tossed the bag down and, disgruntled, she left. 

With that my rose-coloured glasses lifted entirely. He had nothing to do with this stall, he was just speaking to me as a stranger. Without socially acceptable context he’d slipped, like a chameleon, into my day. He was offering me breakfast and polite conversation. But that kind of trust hasn’t existed since the invention of mobile phones. My millennial mind has been trained to be sceptical, and his kindness began to morph into creepiness. I felt vexed at this shattering of my Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday moment. I summoned my most assertive French tone to politely (or not so much) decline, explaining that I’d eaten.

As I was considering my next move a older man with fluffy white-haired appeared. He grunted at us and went to stand towards the back of the stall. He waved me forward to the till and muttered a price. Now this was the behaviour of someone who had been selling these bags for a lifetime, whose passion ran out 50 years ago and who now conducts his transactions with the effort and emotion of a sloth. Although his boredom seemed contagious, I latched onto him. I continued to converse with him despite his silence and turned my back on my offer of second breakfast. Eventually my handsome ‘friend’ retreated, and I tentatively left the stall. 

At the end of the path I saw my stranger had moved onto a young girl with an American accent who replied with loud giggles and phrase book French. I lingered, sensing that I should do something - but what? ‘Watch out for this guy - he’s offering breakfast!’

I was still locked in place when four other American girls, clearly her friends, came out from behind a wall of clothes and whisked her away on a flurry of high-pitched giggles. They walked together one way and the man another. I felt relieved, not because the girl was ok, but somehow seeing him speaking to her seemed to validate my curt treatment of him.

It was just an invite to breakfast. 

He was kind, inquisitive and not offensive or threatening in any explicit way and yet…my gut went into fight-or -flight mode. Maybe because women my age have been taught to keep our guards up, stay in our own little bubbles - wear ear pods on trains, whether we’re listening to anything or not. It’s likely my instincts were right.

Though if we habitually suspect ulterior motives, we forfeit the possibility of stumbling across and recognising spontaneous and sincere kindness. 

************************************

He’d lived in Paris, supposedly the city of love, his whole life. He was in his early thirties and despite his good looks he was aware that genetics had him ageing rapidly - he’d even been mistaken for forty before! Time was getting away, but mostly he was lonely.  

His friends were all coupled up. They said he’d find someone. He just needed to be more open, confident and approachable, all those things that friends, well-intentionally, say that make you want to jump off a tall building. 

It was market day in his worn yet homely suburb. His grandfather used to labour over his leather bags, toiling away to craft them by hand. He’d then sell them, but only to those who truly fell in love with and would treasure them. Sadly, decades of tourists trying to whittle down the price of bags that he’d poured his heart, soul - and literally - sweat into, had diminished his passion for the craft. 

That day the man saw a girl standing by his grandfather’s stall. Perhaps in her early twenties, young - but not too young. Whether she could be interested in him or not, was one thing - the way she was looking over one of his grandfather’s bags, was another. She almost patted it - really feeling the leather properly and following the patterns with her finger. He wanted to talk to someone who could be this interested in his family history. 

He walked over and started to speak with her - not French - though she could speak it, just enough. They chatted about the bag, what she liked about it, and about Paris. She seemed like a curious person, interested in things. He wanted to know about her. He liked her. 

He mustered his courage and asked her if she’d like to have coffee with him at a place nearby. 

She bluntly turned him down, just has his grandfather returned. Humiliated, he left. 

On his way out an American girl asked for directions. He tried to explain to her, but his English wasn’t good enough and he’d had enough embarrassment for one morning. 

The Hug

Caitlin Leishman: 2020 Pencil and pen on paper

Flakes of red get caught in the deep ravines of her upper lip as her shaky hands ritualistically drive a bullet of lipstick across them. A carriage over cobblestones. The wings of her eyeliner, still elegant, are a touch wonky these days, distorted by the wrinkled folds of eyelids that have slowly begun to encroach upon her view of the world. A potent fragrance dabbed, warns of an imminent and overzealous embrace to be bestowed upon them–which they must, if begrudgingly, accept. It’s a scent that for the first twenty years of their lives they will associate with love-tinted tedium. For the next twenty and beyond, halted by the smell of a passer-by or the warmth of a knit, in the absence of the hug itself, will be unparalleled nostalgia.

Am I the next American Psycho? Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime - Val McDermid

Image Credit: BBC (Silent Witness)

Some people find comfort in the strangest of places; camping, IKEA, Love Island. I like dingy cobblestoned alleyways, with officers that are busy, arrogant and a bit self-righteous who spend most of their working life in some kind of transit. They walk and talk, drive fast, drink bad coffee. It’s often raining. 

Why is this grisly murder mystery setting a comforting paradise for me? While I’m hoping that the word ‘mystery’ saves me from being considered for the protagonist in the next Brett Easton Ellis novel, I’m nevertheless concerned about the comfort that I derive from watching these morbid tales.

Since I was 12 years old, I have wanted to be Dr Nikki Alexander. She is the forensic pathologist, forensic anthropologist and humanity defending English rose from the crime series Silent Witness. Nikki, at 27, is an articulate (usually) blonde and blushingly beautiful doctor with more letters after her name than a King of France. Like Nikki I am 27 and the similarities cease there. Unlike Nikki, I’m a brunette with an unreliable Melburnian accent (that often creeps back to its slurry country roots), and I’m the proud owner of one Bachelor of Arts Degree. The only letters that come after my name are ‘xoxo’ when a wave of millennial indecision washes over me and I just cannot choose the right emoji to finish a text.    

Despite the lack of parallels between Nikki and I, I’m not disheartened. Silent Witness is my cure to a hangover, a break-up, and also my ideal way to celebrate the end of the workday. I know what to expect from it. Jack gives a sarcastic commentary of the crime scene, Clarissa hacks every piece of tech in sight, Thomas brings a sense of English gentlemanly authority, while Nikki fights for the underdog. Tarred and feathered, stabbed, shot or mutilated, only to end up being respectfully sliced up in the cutting room. I feel at home amongst these people meeting their gory ends.

My viewing habits have seeped into my other hobbies. After watching an episode where Nikki reconstructs the face of a horrifically burnt victim, I picked up my book to give my crime mind a little break. Yet my book is the engagingly written Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime by crime writer Val McDermid. A digestible (though it might affect your appetite) breakdown of complex forensic techniques, littered with case studies that will keep any forensic wannabes reading into the wee hours of the morning. I was up to the chapter on Facial Reconstruction.   

Evidently, my quest to become Nikki has become ingrained into my subconscious. Ought I to be worried by the warm and fuzzy feeling I got as I gained the knowledge that blowfly maggots can consume 60% of a human corpse in a week?

My concern was slightly alleviated when I discovered that my childhood friend also has a similar Silent Witness obsession. She used to pitch a tent on her farm and set up archaeological digs as though she, just like Nikki, may at any moment discover a bone and probably save the world. Her mother ended up with a garage full of expertly knolled containers of broken glass and delicately brushed rocks. 

So, what can it be about murder mysteries and death that brings about this disconcerting solace and curiosity? These psychological tendencies, they’re usually something to do with childhood, right? Perhaps this is too. But not in the way you think.  

My childhood was trauma free. However, as a child I was allowed to sit up late with my mother to watch a mystery. This was back in the days when there was someone still alive in Midsomer. 

It might sound a bit young for death, but you’re also talking to the girl who preferred Fiddler on the Roof to cartoons during infancy. However, at 5 years old I potentially didn’t grasp the larger issues that Fiddler addresses like religious persecution and arranged marriage, rather I just liked that the girls had really long glossy hair and could sing.

Agatha Christie’s Poirot gave me a taste for glamorous murder by design and fortunately involved fairly sanitised murders, suitable for a younger me. Mum and I would place our bets on ‘who done it’ halfway through, and with that murder mysteries became our ritual.   

Although Silent Witness has been a constant, we would intermittently meander through the investigations of posh inspector DI Lynley to the rugged cliffs of Shetland with DI Jimmy Perez to the lateral thinking Vera and if we felt like a slow burn on a Sunday, we’d spend time with Inspector George Gently on the Tyne river. We had a murder mystery to suit every mood. 

Why does this sustained viewing of murder mysteries fill us with enjoyment rather than a fear for our lives? There’s one element of murder mysteries that brings a sense of reassurance and security, even more perhaps than the warmth of mother and daughter rituals - Motive!

As Poirot says to Linnet Ridgeway in Death on the Nile “The psychology is the most important thing in a case.” I believe it’s also the most important thing for someone watching a murder mystery. When considering the number of people who are murdered in the world, it’s far more reassuring to think that (even if perverted or misguided) the murderer had a reason for their action. A reason, or logic, indicates something that we can begin to control or at least understand. We are safer from killers we understand, even sympathise with, than those who kill for no reason.

In my opinion, this principle extends to juries. I have worked with juries and have witnessed the moment when it dawns on them that their jury service is no longer something annoyingly administrative, but that they are about to make a decision that changes someone’s life forever. In her book Val McDermid notes that ‘juries like motives because it helps them make sense of events that are far beyond their experience of the world’.

We watch the Dr. Nikki Alexanders of the world pull impressive forensic tricks out of the bag. But in the real world, the forensics techniques used in a case is dependent on budget. What a thing to consider!  Some of us work in events or undertake administrative projects where we also work to a budget. However, somewhere out there a DCI is weighing up whether how a person died is worth the cost of conducting complex testing, like facial reconstruction. Further shattering the dramatic illusion we see onscreen, in McDermid’s book she interviews Crime Scene Investigator Peter Arnold who comments that “the public thinks we have more tricks than we do, and when CSIs say [it’s not possible to] examine something they’re sometimes not believed.”

I know Silent Witness and the murders I watch on screen are fiction. Yet I still experience the same shivery feeling that I used to get as a child at night after watching an immersive mystery. As I lean down to spit out my toothpaste, I feel utterly certain that I will look up to find the face of a silent intruder and their knife in my mirror.

From my research I believe that it’s too soon to diagnose myself as the next American Psycho. Rather, it seems my obsession has endured due to something far less scary - nostalgia and an interest in the dead as a bid to better understand the living. 

Anyone who has found themselves similarly unsettled by their love of a murder mystery will appreciate McDermid’s unravelling of the facts behind the tasks that we see our favourite, and we must remind ourselves, fictional characters perform onscreen. McDermid speaks to the real-life pathologists in cutting rooms around the world and highlights their dedication and willingness to put their reputation on the line, in a courtroom in the name of justice. While they may not receive the widespread public admiration that Dr Nikki Alexander does, after reading this book, there’s no doubting that they deserve it.

An ode to bedtime stories

In my bedtime stories I was the Secretary General of the United Nations. These stories painted me as strong, elegant and supremely intelligent, though empathetic in my conduct. Think Cate Blanchett. So, in my 9-year-old mind, it didn’t seem to matter that I didn’t know what the Secretary General of the UN was, or did. I knew how I needed to act.  

These ambitious bedtime stories were the invention of our family friend Facey. True to her name she was expressive and articulated with the sarcastic and quick-witted prose of a cheerier Helen Garner. Charismatically, as though on stage, she’d routinely shout - ‘DICKENS!’ - whether or not anyone had asked for a reading recommendation. For Facey, Dickens could solve most issues. If politicians spoke rubbish on TV - Facey insisted, they could be bought back to reality by a dose of Dickens. If kids played up at the high school, a detention with Dickens would do the trick. 

 In her storytelling, Facey drew inspiration from the classics. She’d start with three bears and a curly-haired girl, but soon enough I appeared in front of an assembly, negotiating world peace and providing security for all. The stories flattered me, almost as much as the fact that she bothered to spend time with a 9-year-old. As I dozed off, I’d feel proud and capable, my dreams brimming with possibility. 

 Curious about my path to success, I spoke to my Dad, who was conveniently the High School careers leader in our tiny town.  

“What do I need to do to become Secretary General of the United Nations?”

He peered at me over the top of his little glasses that sat on the end of his long nose.  

“As in, is there a Secretary General of the United Nations course? It doesn’t quite work like that Caito. You might look at studying Politics first, then International politics, and then become a Government Official, then a Diplomat or something.”

Doubt set in.

Until then I’d been surrounded by professions that had their task clearly in their title. A teacher teaches, a publican runs the pub, a nurse nurses, a checkout chick works behind a checkout. What started with the Secretary General of the UN, was an introduction to a world of mysteriously titled professions. 

At university I dipped my toe into International Politics alongside a young man who went to the same college as me. I attended every lecture and tutorial, read every reading, made notes and planned my essays diligently. He sauntered into tutorials late, and only when he had to attend having used up all his free passes. He’d outwit the tutor and never failed to win a debate (or start one) despite having done no preparation for class. He handed in essays in their first draft, paper crumpled and coffee stained, a stream of thought that was nevertheless a convincing manifesto. He aced the subject. I, to say the least, did not! The realisation that good notes didn’t guarantee success in politics, bought my political career to a swift close. 

More recently I was reminded of my bedtime stories. The Economist interviewed Secretary General Guterres, about whether the United Nations as an organisation still works. Guterres emphasised the organisations successful efforts with humanitarian aid but agreed, more diplomatically, that it’s tricky to provide world security when two superpowers like China and America won’t play nice, as Russia looms in the shadows waiting to pounce.  I can’t say I envy his role. 

I didn’t become Secretary General of the UN, but I have read more Dickens. In fact, I read every night before I go to sleep. The stresses of COVID 19 are no doubt seeping into the dreams of many adults, but children also absorb the symptoms of their parents stresses. The bedtime story is a small window for a young person to be inspired, to be reminded that they’re not alone, and for them to slip from that encouraging reassurance into their dreams. Yet perhaps bedtime stories can do adults just as much good as children in the current climate. This moment when the day has ended, but before eyes are shut, is a chance to set the scene for sweeter dreams regardless of age. 

Here’s to Facey - lover of Dickens and master of the bedtime story.