text only writing about contact
 

I chose the name "over there" to be my creative, academic and professional identity because I didn't want to be central, because where I live is always being referred to as "down under" or even further away from wherever IS considered as the reference point for everywhere else. My 'here' was once described as "the arse end of the arse end of the earth". So OVER THERE is in opposition to all that, and also because the words "over there" feature in prose and poetry by two of my favourite authors.

The following excerpt is taken from 1997's Rootprints by Hélène Cixous:

She. It is the other which is called with the feminine pronoun: the title of Hélène Cixous's book, La, plays on the definite and on the infinite. On every possible designation: all is terra incognita. Designating the gesture of designation.

There is more. When La takes an accent, it takes on the accent of the beyond (beyond, over there), and co-responding ot the It [Ça], crosses the limit: gives to the body 'the desire to run through overflowing regions, the desire to invent transports, carriages to draw oneself within reach of the Unknown, the art of going Là [over there/here] ...' (La 83) (Rootprints 169-70). [La was written in 1976.]
And, in 1862 Emily Dickinson, poet extraodinaire, wrote:

I CANNOT LIVE WITH YOU

I cannot live with you,
It would be life,
And life is over there
Behind the shelf

The sexton keeps the key to,
Putting up
Our life, his porcelain,
Like a cup

Discarded of the housewife,
Quaint or broken;
A newer Sèvres pleases,
Old ones crack.

I could not die with you,
For one must wait
To shut the other's gaze down --
You could not.

And I, could I stand by
And see you freeze,
Without my right of frost,
Death's privilege?

Nor could I rise with you,
Because your face
Would put out Jesus',
That new grace

Glow plain and foreign
On my homesick eye,
Except that you, than he
Shone closer by.

They'd judge us -- how?
For you served heaven, you know,
Or sought to;
I could not,

Because you saturated sight,
And I had no more eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise.

And were you lost, I would be,
Though my name
Rang loudest
On the heavenly fame.

And were you saved,
And I condemned to be
Where you were not,
That self were hell to me.

So we must keep apart,
You there, I here,
With just the door ajar
That oceans are,
And prayer,
And that pale sustenance,
Despair!

So, somehow, on this site, which aims towards intertexual play, I hope to allow text, image, thought, emotion, appetite, ambition, dreams, imagination, and everything (both existent and not) ... across time, space and being ... to resonate.

Too much to wish for? I hope not.

d