The TV shows me things that have already happened as if they are happening right now. People’s past projections and recreations, actors in costumes making shapes and hierarchies orchestrated by people we can’t see. I call upon images of people like dead loved ones through a portal and ask them to remind me of lives I might have lived. My memories are so wound up in visual narratives; story, image and experience helix until we three are free-falling, interweaving and diving into the depths of the everything ever documented.

Most of the time, images aren’t enough. I go to the source we all call upon before recreation. The riverbed, the water, the shade of a tree, the horizon line. Stare deep into the world’s many faces and sense a stirring more satisfying than any kind of mediated expression. Some days though, I seek out reflections to soothe the sore parts of myself the sky can’t reach.

Today’s summoning, Jane Campion’s Bright Star.

Her film drifts at the speed of the seasons and wafts around the unfolding relationship between Romantic poet John Keats and Hampstead local Fanny Brawne, spanning from their meeting in November 1818 until Keats’ death in February 1821. To watch this film is to willingly open a wound. Love and pain swell up from a place beyond here and now. I am borrowing from the shared well of human experience: Jane Campion translates the story of John Keats and Fanny Brawne’s love and imbues it with her own feeling; John Keats interprets the world, his love of it, and transforms it into writing.

Campion attends more to the inspiration behind Keats’ now famous, then panned, poems than she does to the poetry itself. Around the mid-point as spring slowly creeps in and love is kindling, Keats, his friend and financier, Charles Brown, and Fanny’s brother, Samuel, search for a nightingale nest in the orchard by their shared home. Keats climbs up through the branches of a cherry tree and lies atop the thick, mostly bare yet close to blossoming crown. Densely packed enough to support the entire outstretched length of his supine body. The frame lingers as he suns himself. We witness a person just being in world. No calculation, no scheming as to how this can be worked into a story.

Yet the poem, Ode to a Nightingale, flows fluidly out from this experience two scenes on in languid voice-over. Keats sits alone under the same tree, eyes closed, as Fanny watches him through a window; the frame hinting at rather than claiming the connection between life and art. The sunlight, the smells, the songbird behind the poem can never been known or pinned down. Here, Campion expands outwards from imagined sensation by recreating in fragrant tableaux the imagery from Keats’ poetry. Out of a poet, she makes a man, not the other way around. Bringing words back to the body that conjured them.

Before words, before speech, before I make a sound, what is there?

I lie under one of three elms in Edinburgh Gardens marked for felling. Looking up at the branches beginning to leaf, I become aware of my breath, its sibilance, and wonder how quickly the two of us, elm and woman, metabolise each others air. Wonder if the force of my exhale is strong enough to send carbon dioxide upwards or if the wind has to catch and carry it. Hands on ribs, I direct air in a long thing stream through my lips and up towards the tree. Inhaling, I imagine the contraction of my diaphragm increasing the space in my chest so that the air, the world, the tree’s exhale, can rush in to fill it.1

Earlier in the year I took a single-day Voice workshop at NIDA. Here, I was told that voice is not the same as speech. Voice is the sound produced by the movement and vibration of your internal cavities and muscles; speech is what happens when these sounds are shaped and morphed into discernible language. Words and sentences. Voice begins with the breath and the muscles that support it, with the transaction of air moving in an out of the body. More of the day was spent breathing and making unintelligible sounds than it was speaking to one another.

We sit in a circle and rest our hands on our stomachs. The teacher instructs us to cough over and over again and notice the inner pull of the stomach muscles. “This is the beginning of the voice, this is where the authentic voice is found” he says. Not the throat or the mouth but the deep muscles that hug in so air can be expelled in the form of sounds and words. We cough until instructed to start letting out intentional sound. Huh, huh, huh.

I think of John Keats coughing up blood. Staining sheets and pillowcases on the slow descent into acute tuberculosis. I think of his mother and brother coughing before him, choking on blood. I think of Fanny’s father coughing and spluttering, muscles forcefully contracting in an attempt to push out obstructions in the lungs. Tuberculosis claimed all three, drowning them in their own fluid from the inside out. I’ll never hear Keats’ voice, only ever his transcribed speech.

In two of the poems present in Campion’s film, the imagery of breath summons the fragile precipice between life and death. In Ode To A Nightingale, death pulls his breath from him:

I have been half in love with easeful death, 
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, 
To take into the air my quiet breath; 
Now more than ever seems rich to die (lines 52-55)

Death will take his breath away and in doing so, removes the air that forms the spoken words and de-animates the being that thinks them.

Later in the film, following Keats’ unapproved proposal to Fanny, the two sit side by side in his study. Keats rests his head against her chest and speaks from the end of his sonnet, Bright Star, would I were as steadfast as thou art:

Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender taken breath (lines 10-13)

It strikes me that a person, a poet, is not their poem. Art, like love, has to come back to the tangible. It exists not in the mind, in the invisible cloud about our eyebrows that extends from the crown into the stratosphere, the endless black ether. We call the imagination boundless but it is not. It is bound, braided to the material world. Hands hold, eyes gaze, ears attune to someone else’s breathing. The body is a sensory organ.

In the sonnet Bright Star, Keats imagines the existence of a long-lived star but ultimately turns from the loneliness of cosmic omnipotence, death’s ether, which the soul returns to, in favour of the physical, the human. Fanny’s chest rises and falls under his ear, she strokes his hair, their hands entwine. Before there was a poem, there was a woman. There were his family members, his mother and brother, and countless patients he attended to as an apprentice surgeon and apothecary whose bodies he saw laboured in breathing, in the effort to sustain themselves. There was his hand upon their skin, comforting and feeling for proof of life.

Though this scene is fabricated by Campion, Keats is more real to me in this moment than when I read the same poem on the page. Fanny exhales, John inhales the same air. Keats is closer to being the breath Fanny breathes than he is the words written down that the world remembers. He is the body that calls in the breath, the muscles that expel it. Before forming words he had to experience them.

They day is warm and I have walked a long way to be here. Feet dusty and the hem of my trousers dirty with pedestrian pollution. I know I’ll be wearing the lines of my sandals when I take them off later. I’ve come to the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome to visit the unnamed grave of John Keats and I find him in the corner of the oldest part of the graveyard where the tombstones are scattered like dropped dice under the shade of stone pines.

I stare at the stone and expect to feel something. Read the words over and over like a summoning spell. Here lies one whose name is writ in water. Writ in water. Writ in water. I feel the pressure to stay longer than I want to, to force an expected feeling that I don’t have. I call up images from the film. Imagine the mist over the Spanish Steps as Keats’ coffin was lifted into a carriage. Fanny collapsing on the floor of the hallway crying “Mama I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,” when Charles Brown delivers the news of Keats’ death to her. Breath stolen from her as well as him. I feel more when I think of these than when I look at his tombstone. Why? Disappointed in myself, I move on.

I walk slowly around the perimeter of the wall and pause, facing it. The shadows of two trees are cast onto the washed pink surface, a cat walks along the ledge. I watch the wind move the silhouette back and forth, feel the same wind move across me.

A moment from early in the film comes to mind. Fanny has sought out poetry lessons from Keats, an endearing attempt to understand him and to spend more time with him. They sit at a desk by the window of Keats’ office and he attempts to find words to explain poetic craft and the difference between life and the poetry that somehow overflows from it. “The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”

Before there are words, there is the quiet of the world as you move through it. I reach back and back for this film, for film broadly, to show me the world as I know it without there being a need to speak. In the visual there is simply acknowledgement and recognition. His grave says his name was writ in water. Maybe he died believing no one would remember. Keats’ bones lie metres away, uncaressed by any breeze, untouched by any water. But I know that there was once a wind that touched him, not because I’ve seen Ben Wishaw’s hair wet and whipping on a screen but because I feel it myself. I can’t see the trees that cast the shadows on the wall but I don’t need to in order to know that we are feeling the same thing.

Why do I keep reopening this wound? Do I come back to this film because it stands in for my own experiences? Is it because I have experienced the depths of love that I am able to know Fanny and John’s? As if in watching them, the sediment of memory that has settled uncouples itself from the ocean floor of my consciousness and floats back to the surface of myself to be felt again.

Or do they succeed because they create anew in us desires for the depicted depths of experience that we long for? I wouldn’t have been so swayed by the field of bluebell’s outside of a home I was visiting in Devon last May if I hadn’t watched Abbie Cornish read a letter and kiss her sister amongst them over and over. I experienced them through Jane Campion’s attention, saw them differently because of the filmic memory attached.

The question I am really getting at here is what is mine and what is yours? Where is the separation between John Keats’ worship of the world and Jane Campion’s acknowledgement of it and my piecing together of their mutual worship and my noticing the sweetness of the mock orange tree hanging over my front gate that has begun buzzing with wasps and my love of the soon-to-be cut down elm trees? What is your breath, what is mine?

The opening of Keats’ Endymion reads,

A thing of beauty is a thing forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness: but will still keep
A bower for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. (Lines 1-5)

The thing that lasts forever is the world we live in, enduring, steadfast. It’s the world where John lived, Jane lives, I live. I like to think we know each other through shared witnessing. All three of us circling the same sun, souls spinning in the same whirlpool galaxy.

Watching films can feel like making a pilgrimage to a grave, the two are twinned. Visiting a place where a thing can hold you because a part of it has already soothed the wounded and raw abrasions on the soul you didn’t know someone else could see. When I was eighteen I visited the grave of Oscar Wilde in Paris and there I could smell the sweet scent of flowers that came through the windows into the painting studio on the opening pages of Dorian Grey and I wept for the man who wrote those scents into being so that I could smell them years later in Sydney and in Paris where no roses grew.

In my living room I watch Fanny Brawne kiss a letter all over at Keats’ request so that he can kiss the page and from afar know their lips have connected. Slivers and whisperings of each other through an intermediary. Through film, this film, I’m reminded of the touch of the world. There is no medium, there is no message. Only this light shining through a window and a wind that once touched my shoulders to tell me that I am.

I sit in a cafe and look down at my hands, the curve of the pinky-finger-side of my wrist, witness my outline against a wooden table. Yellow pink against brown. I lift my arm up and now I’m outlined against black floorboards, then blue booth chair. Touch the dark wood of the table again and try to remember the alive thing it once was when messages about when to leaf and when to winter flowed up in the form of liquid sugar from root to crown. The separation between me and others, things, masses perplexes me.

A memory surfaces. A passage from a book I didn’t fully understand when I first found it. At the beginning of Ursula K Le Guin’s novel Always Coming Home1, a young girl, her mother and her grandmother travel to the village where the girl’s grandfather lives. He is both estranged and strange, pessimistic, self-important. He tells the women he has learnt how to pass his body through solid substance and the grandmother laughs.

He waves a wooden paddle and it passes through his arm. When the young girl offers him her arm, he passes it through her as well. “I felt the soft motion of it; it felt as a candle flame feels when you pass a finger through. It made me laugh with surprise”. Her reaction is laughter; her grandmother’s, anger; and her mother’s, conciliation. The unpredictable responses of people when preconceived boundaries are crossed, laws of the physical realm are proven to be as solid as smoke from a fire. The outline is in question, permeable rather than repellant.

My room, in bed, two hearts. When we finish, I ask him to let all of his weight fall on me. To stop holding himself up. He yields, heavy. I squeeze around him. A groan. I ask him what it feels like and he takes my finger in his hand, clenches his fingers around it. Firm, certain. “That strong?” He presses my finger again, a little softer.

Here we are trying to communicate sensation to each other even as we overlap. I only know the wetness of his breath on my shoulder not the vocal cords and cavities it travels through to reach me. I only know the air in my body pushing out of my lips and dampening the itch of hair under his jaw. I know both of these things through my skin and not his. We approximate, find middle ground, accept it.

On my bedside table, a postcard, an artwork. Beat Piece, 1963 Autumn. One of Yoko Ono’s early instruction works, collected among 150 other instructions and event scores in her debut text Grapefruit. By instruction work, I mean a piece that instructs the viewer to engage with a work or an environment in which it’s consumed in a certain way. Beat Piece simply instructs, “Listen to a heart beat.”

I found the work in London last year, pages from the book framed and hung in one line along a gallery wall. Early in the exhibition, we don’t follow the commands; we observe them. Unanswered questions. In later rooms, as we move beyond Grapefruit to further experiments in performance art, her works become interactive. A piece of white canvas is hung in the middle of a room with a rip at its centre; we’re invited to stand on one side and poke a hand through the wound. A stranger can approach and shake it. Sanctioned public touching within a designated container. My best friend puts her hand through it, waits, then laughs when someone tickles her palm instead of gripping it.

Ono’s work dissolves distinction. Between art and object, consumer and artist, action and observation, stranger and stranger, body and body. Her offerings are only one half of a piece, they require engagement, partnership for their completion. Transcending beyond a written instruction on a page, the interaction becomes the art. With two friends, I participate in Bag Piece. By a wall in a central gallery, black spandex bags hang on pegs. Next to them, a large square is taped on the floor. Our role is to climb into the bag and move about within the square surrounded by a crowd of people.

In the bag, we stretch our arms and roll around, sit, stand, make swimming motions with our arms as we lay on our stomachs. Returned to the imaginary sanctum of childhood. From the outside, there is one thing not three. The bag sheaths our individuality and turns us into something else, an amorphous black being, roiling with a chaotic logic and unafraid of expression in a public forum. It creates a visible boundary that in turn disappears the invisibly accepted regulations of behaviour. The many collapses into one. Gallery attendees become the exhibition people pay to see. Is all it takes a new skin, a flexible container for a multiplicity of aliveness to mingle?

Yoko Ono. Bag Piece (1964), performed during Perpetual Fluxfest, Cinematheque, New York, June 27, 1965.

To bring this collapsing across an ocean to my home, I push my hands together. Repeating a gestural exercise I’ve come back to again and again since I was little to experience the limits of my own outline. I had no words for it back then, just the subconscious attempt to erase the thing (psychological or physical) that keeps the two stretches of skin separated. Try it with me.

Press your hands together. Align your wrists and pair your fingers. The soft pads press and the convex curl of your palms create a cavity. Look at your index fingers, they are probably arching away in the middle, only meeting at their steeple. Bring the middle knuckles to touch so that a long black line forms between them.

In a moment, close your eyes. Can you distinguish between what your right hand feels separate to your left hand? Can you separate sensation between the pads of opposite fingers, the mounds at the base of your thumb? Slowly rub your hands together. Fit the soft ridge under your fingers into the palm of the other hand. Try to discern what different hands are feeling. Massage a thumb into the opposite palm, move it over each knuckle on the inside and outside of the hand. What is thumb? What is finger?

Now look into the line between your two hands. Push harder into your hands as if trying to eliminate the gap. Trying to merge the skin together. Press your arms harder until you feel it in your biceps. Finger tips as well, not just wrists. Harder until you start to shake. Pullback a little. Push again until the shaking starts. Your neck might start to tense, your chest muscles and the area under your armpits. Then let go. Let your hands fall away from each other.2

I still perform this. I’ve never succeeded in overlapping my hands, in pushing my right hand into the space my left occupies nor left to right. Skin, muscle fat compressed with force, morphing without giving way. It frustrates me, the immutability of my body. Before the pushing, there is a moment of confusion. I cannot differentiate which palm is which, only a warmth. As a child, it was impossible to comprehend that two hands don’t need to move into each other’s space in order to become the same thing. Like three bodies moving in a bag, from another angle, they are one.

In one of the first modules of yoga teacher training, we learn how to hold others.

Not in an embrace but with presence, with gaze. The exercise was to look into someone’s eyes while sending out an unspoken intention. For the person you are looking at, the intention is to simply receive. The first intention the group is given is acceptance. Accept the whole of who someone is. Hold them without judgment. Let them know they are accepted. The second intent is judgement. Send criticism their way. Without letting your eyes roam, try to tear them apart. It feels awful, a person becomes parts, to appraise you have to break down. To accept, an idea of their wholeness must come forward.

Then we move onto physical holding. In groups of three, one person lies supine on the floor, eyes closed. One person kneels at their head and asks where they would like to receive support: their head, their shoulders, their chest or their stomach. They then place their hands firmly on that part of the body: hands forming a bowl around the base of the skull, or pressing down on their shoulders, or coming to kneel at their side and stacking the hands over the chest centre or the stomach. The third person kneels at their feet and clasps their ankles. The instruction was simple: hold this person unconditionally. Think of nothing else but them.

I remember holding onto a someone’s shins, palms finding a comfortable grip with my thumbs resting under the inner ankles and fingers cupping around the calf. The longer we find stillness there, the more I become aware of their heartbeat. The feeling of my own heartbeat pulsing at the base of my thumb. A alternate beat to theirs that gradually synchronises. And then the noticing of a gentle pulse of fluid moving too and fro up the backs of their legs.3 An ebb distinct from the heartbeat. A blooming of love for this near-stranger and their life-force as messages from my hand travel away, up then back again. The holding returns to my hands, I begin to hold myself.

I think again of Beat Piece. Listen to a heart beat. Instruction works never end. The commands are spoken, written once and are endlessly repeatable. The same instruction expresses itself simultaneously and serendipitously across disciplines. The art creates itself over and over again with every repetition.

Sixty-two years later in my bedroom, we reenacted Beat Piece and for a moment rather than trying to explain sensation to each other as separate skins, we listened. Head on chest. The same as hands on ankles, we’re trying to imagine someone else’s aliveness. Breath in, the heart beat quickens. Breath out, it slows. Breath in, hearts begin to sync. Breath out, a peace more than peace. For a moment, ear and heart become the same organ. A body listening to itself. The veil is thinner than we think between the polarities of witnessing and experiencing.

So, Always Coming Home.

A title borrowed from a book, an author, a woman I love. There’s discomfort in reproducing her chosen words to house my writing. Like sheltering under someone’s too-small umbrella in the rain. Shoulders bump, the ends of my hair get wet, two people in too tiny of a space yet trying to be here together. Maybe like the first cells in a sea of fluid, we split. I stop existing inside of her stories and a membrane forms around me to shelter my own. The DNA is carried through, I remember her as if remembering the place I return to when I sleep.

In the same passage from Always Coming Home, the girl’s grandfather speaks before passing the paddle through his own arm. He said, “You have to learn that your pains and aches are merely an error in thinking. Your body is not real.” His wife, the girl’s grandmother replies, “I think it’s real.”

Where I am now, I put a hand on my thigh and push down. Pressure through the heel of my wrist displacing the tissue of my leg. Now fingers pushing with an attempted equal force. My palm domes, the flesh my wrist pushes down on sidesteps into the tent of my palm. Attempt to push down on my palm, the strength of my wrist lessens. The muscles on my leg won’t be moved. I cannot push myself into my self, I cannot be where I already am.

I think it’s real. I think you’re real. One day maybe we’ll push palms together and forget where one hands ends and feel only the warmth of a cell we used to be.