We were competing with Zumba and Tai Kwon Do classes. Downstairs the joint was being cash-flowed by the steady press of fingers on slot machine buttons. I’d come from a day of shooting a corporate video at a fish-processing works.

The Returned Servicemen’s League came into being as a response to the valor of Australian soldiers in various wars. I remembered the RSL club in my home town in the 1950s. Squadron Leader Harvey Charlesworth (school principal) hammering away at the piano whilst my father, Lt. Bob Emery, MM, (local farmer) screwed up his face and attacked his cornet. Ten years earlier both had been scared witless in and over the New Guinea jungle. Dad carried (and played) his cornet right through the campaign. He’d won his Military Medal as a sergeant and received a field promotion soon after.

Many years later – and several years apart – we would see both my mother and my father off into the nether world at that same club. She and the RSL Ladies Auxiliary had run the dinners, the dances, the social events that held that small, coastal community together. Holding a community together was something she modeled for me, both at the RSL and as Anglican church organist and member of the church council, and as the mother of four children on an isolated farm.

Now I was in a big city RSL club arguing for the merits of ‘digital storytelling’: new media vs old media. What were the differences? What was the way forward? Is there such a thing as ‘new media’? What is the place of the author in it?

Well, my first communications medium was a school exercise book interfacing with a Post Office pen and nib and a standard school inkwell at the top of my desk. My first typewriter was an Olivetti Dora portable that sat atop my backpack as I hitch-hiked Australia. I wrote my first book of short stories on that machine. Now I had a Macbook with enough computing power to fly me to the moon and back.

I’ve always been an author. But now I realize that I’ve also always been a story-maker. There’s a difference. As a child on the farm I would create and organize vast, interactive games for my brother and me and our friends. I would create the story universe: the overarching war-game; the city; the family; the doctors and nurses scenario; the highwayman and the lady; the Cowboys and Indians scenario. The others would contribute their own scenarios, narratives, responses, within that overarching universe. These were narratives created and sustained by the participants. User Generated Content, as we say nowadays.

But I got seduced by the power of the myth of the sole creator. The writer as the individual voice rising out of the collective. The only one in the village with the skill and power to tell the village stories. I worshipped at the altar of the Great Writers. My desire was to be one of them. To join the Elect (and select) Priesthood of Story. I traveled the land with my Olivetti listening to and writing down the stories others told me. I re-told those stories as ‘my’ stories. After all, I owned the technology (the Olivetti), I had the programming skills (the ability to string sentences together), I sourced the delivery medium (the magazine). I kept the cheque.

It was fascinating at the RSL Club forum to hear how passionately the Writers Guild members clung to the myth of the creator God/writer. Joseph Campbell was evoked. My suggestion that we open up our story worlds so that others could tell their stories within them was met with fear, hostility, and a condescending dismissal of such stories as lacking the integrative art of the true storyteller to ‘make it into a story’. The raw details of the untutored recollection of events was not a ‘story’ until an author had hammered it into respectable shape. Perhaps had fitted the Hero’s Journey template over it. Only then had it passed through the fire and been stamped with the stamp of authorship, so it no longer belonged to the community but to the author.

No, ordinary people could not be trusted to tell their extraordinary stories.

I recalled a community story workshop I’d run near my home-town after major bush-fires had devastated the farms and pine forests there. Such stories! Such raw, vivid, emotion and trauma. The decision whether to stay and fight the firestorm or flee. Husband against wife. Male testosterone pumping, looking for a fight…even a fight with an enemy way, way beyond his powers. The woman’s journey into the smoke with her children, pursued by fireballs. Car crashes in the smoke and confusion. She never saw him again.

What could I do in the face of all this? I could hold space for them. I could acknowledge their pain and loss and grief and I could help them focus on the craft of storytelling. I could get them to mold ‘stories’ out of their raw experience. I began to see how ‘story’ – an artificial reconstruction of trauma – could serve as a path to healing.

That was a long time ago. But pain and trauma is always with us. It is the core of ‘story’. It is the essence of human communications. We cannot take away from people the ownership of their own experience. We have to honor it and – as professional story-makers – offer what we can to them to enable them to reach out and tell their experience. That is my philosophy of interactive story-making.

That is what I can offer. That is why I have become passionate about the potential for digital media to act as the holding space for people’s stories, and for the ‘author’s’ role as the mediator who can work with those people and their stories and create a rich and binding tapestry of human emotion linking whole communities together once again.

Henrik Ibsen,  Peer Gynt, Act V.

[Peer  Gynt takes an onion and pulls off layer after layer.]

………………..

[Pulls off several layers at once.]

What an enormous number of swathings!
Isn’t the kernel soon coming to light?

[Pulls the whole onion to pieces.]

I’m blest if it is! To the innermost centre,
it’s nothing but swathings—each smaller and smaller.—
Nature is witty!

[Throws the fragments away.]

The devil take brooding!
If one goes about thinking, one’s apt to stumble.
Well, I can at any rate laugh at that danger;
for here on all fours I am firmly planted.

[Scratches his head.]

A queer enough business, the whole concern!
Life, as they say, plays with cards up its sleeve;
but when one snatches at them, they’ve disappeared,
and one grips something else,—or else nothing at all.

Looking back at my finished memoir now, I have discovered more layers that need to be peeled away. But Peer Gynt’s onion came to an end. There was nothing left. Yet I find that my own inner onion goes on and on.

I shall switch metaphors. Writing my memoir has been like plunging into a Mandelbrot Set. The deeper I go, the more each element in it opens up to reveal greater and greater dimensions of both beauty and terror. A ride into this fractal set is a ride that challenges everything. And, unlike Peer Gynt’s onion, it is bounded yet endless.

This gives the lie to the idea that, ‘life is a journey’. It challenges the subtitle of my book, “A Personal Journey From Man to Woman”. Journeys take place in linear time. But the life I have discovered is one of a flowering, a constant opening up within an endless ‘moment’. It runs differently to my first intimation of it when I read Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’.

‘For all things that can run must also run once again forward along this long lane.’

‘And this slow spider that creeps along in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you at this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things – must we not all have been here before?

‘ — and must we not return and run down that other lane out before us, down that long, terrible lane—must we not return eternally?’

For the Self that returns to meet itself is different to how it was at that first meeting. We cannot return unchanged and be our previous self. When I now come back to face a memory I had previously interrogated I find new depths within it, new revelations and insights. I am no longer myself. 

The journey that is not a journey goes on.

Zoom into the Mandelbrot Set here

I got there at 9.20 and walked in on a group already under way. I was scared. My way of handling fear in public is to put forward the most stylish face I can.  I’d got up early and given myself a mud mask, washed and blow-dried my hair, chosen my tight Escada skirt and form-fitting Hugo Boss jacket, used my best beauty products. I felt good about myself and knew I looked good and that gave me the confidence to walk into this group of total strangers and prepare to strip myself naked.

For 3 hours I was just “Josephine Emery, Participant”. Then, over lunch, I showed the 20 minute DVD cut of my gender change documentary. It begins with a very uptight, suffering man with receding grey hair and a lined and worried face, saying, “A transgendered person is someone who wakes up in the morning, looks at their body and says, ‘Get me out of this’.” It ends with me standing on a hillside as the sun sets, saying, “I’ve given myself up to my mother’s love and through her love to universal love…”

Along the way it visits my memory of watching a woman raped and murdered when I was two, and thus learning fear and terror around, “what it would mean to be a woman”.

At the end of the DVD the 30 participants were silent. Of the 15 women, not one did not have a tear-stained face.

I then talked about living the change in the public arena; about the differences between men and women in anger expression; in the use of voice in corporate power; etc.

Afterwards half of the women spoke to me privately, 1-on-1. “You have made me realize what I have not valued in myself as a woman. You have empowered me.” “You spoke about the real differences between men and women that are not acknowledged in the corporation.” These were the reactions I had anticipated.

But they also said to me, “You have named the unnameable for us. The fear of rape is always present somewhere in a woman’s mind. It’s there whether you are at work or on the train or walking down the street. You have brought it out and made it visible. Thank you.”

The next time I flew I watched the news on the video console. A report on a celebrity murder where a beautiful young woman was thrown off a cliff by her lover. An acid attack somewhere in the world on some women. A brutal rape and an appeal for ‘the public to come forward with information’. A well-groomed woman read all this into the camera and smiled at the end.

We landed and retrieved our work bags with their little wheels and headed off to our meetings, all of us corporate women looking so smart and in control. The men in the boardrooms all waiting, smirking and easing their crotches as we approached. And that whisper in the back of our minds…

I thought that I was striving towards becoming the person hidden inside me.  But when I got there I found a person who was not striving to be someone else. So I could not recognise her as, “Me”. My concept of “I” or “me” was predicated upon striving. For many years I was a man striving not to become a woman. Then I flipped and became a man striving to become a woman.  Now I suddenly find myself as a woman with no striving to do. I can’t cope! 

What do I do with the past that is embedded deep within me? There are memories that are important to my core sense of being, but there are also feelings and reactions that are no longer suitable for my life. I have no need to be secretive. I have no need to be guarded and quick to take offense. I have no need to be closed. There is no need to seek out people who will close themselves off from me. All that has gone.

This recursive mental loop that is “I” tries to dip back into memory and feed upon that constant stream to strengthen itself. “I”, the ego, the sense of who I am can only keep itself alive by cannibalizing my past. Those old synaptic links wave frantically: trying to call something into their maw. But “I”, or “It”, don’t/doesn’t want to go there any more. They’ll have to go hungry, wither and die.

That’s it! There’s stuff dying inside me. It’s like a forest fire has raged through me. Nights of sweating fevers and hideous dreams and hours watching the digital clock blink over. I’m now burnt out. The crunch of burnt grass beneath my feet. Blackened tree trunks and the frail bones of animals that didn’t make it clear.

And here, on this gaunt and twisted limb, a tender shoot of translucent green, its tip glistening toward the sun. And here another, and another, A fuzz of the palest green now coating the black. In the soot and ash soil, tiny shoots breaking through and beginning to uncoil.

This is the new ME growing out of the remains of the old.

And that old ego turning back on itself and sniffing this new life and not recognizing it. “This is not Me!” it says. Self and Ego meet and do not recognize each other.  They circle warily. 

“Who are you?”

“I’m you. You’re me.”

“No you’re not. No, I’m not! I’m not like you at all!”

“You never wanted to be me?”

“I never knew it would happen. I thought it was just a fantasy. One I hated! One I wanted to get rid of – and yet couldn’t. It was like I needed to have you hiding away in me. That was important to me. But it was a…a thing I was ashamed of. I didn’t want it to be seen!”

“Well, here I am, and you and I are going on a journey together. We’ll get to know each other on the road.”

“A journey! I’ve always loved traveling. How did you know?”

“Ahh! I know a thing or two about you. Just follow me.”

 

SAYING GOODBYE TO A FRIEND

I’m saying goodbye to my best friend:

Pain.

When we first met I didn’t like you at all.

You played rough.

But you did play my game.

We were like Gilgamesh and Enkidu

taking on the Scorpion God,

going in search of the waters of immortality.

The adventures we had!

And we stuck up for each other in a fight.

You rewrote the map of my body.

You kept me in touch with my soul.

Freezing nights in the desert when nobody would call

and the stars seemed to have turned their backs.

In that black despair

you were always there.

I hated you but I needed you.

I loved you.

And maybe that’s the problem,

dear friend.

I wanted you so much

that I invented reasons

to stay in touch.

I picked fights just so you

would come to my rescue.

Look, I feel really bad about this,

but it’s not about you,

it’s about me. I’m the one who’s changed.

I don’t belong in the desert any more.

See the walls of this city?

It’s my new home.

You won’t fit in.

You are their nemesis.

Black star in the firmament

I have to let you go

because the gates are opening,

and they’re opening for me.

I must go. I can hear them

singing a new and joyous song.

That song is mine.

josephine