Separation Studies
(*best viewed on desktop or landscape mode)
1. Separation of parts
Have you ever watched a butcher at work? It’s not a habit of mine or anything. I don’t eat meat, but I’m not mortified by it, although maybe I am a little bit ashamed of that: the visceral truth of a corpse used to haunt me in a very diligent way (leather car seats; cooked meat as burnt flesh; the shock of close friends dying without warning).
With the eyes I have now, I see the butcher transforming a sort-of abstract thing (‘pig’, ‘cow’) into completely abstracted things (‘flank’, ’T-bone’, ‘loin’). Dramatic constructions of pink, fringed white. Driving the tip of a knife, dragging the blade’s edge along a ridge of fat or bone. The butcher creates a facsimile, like a seamster with a pattern.
I don’t want to see iron-red blood. Being liquid-filled is precarious enough without seeing it spilled on an inhospitable floor.
A few weeks ago, I sent a doctor photographs of my chest and the area just beneath my shoulder blade, and he told me I had shingles. The virus is expressed by nerve damage (and correspondingly, on the body’s surface, by spots and a rash); my skin had been marked along a roughly even line around the right side of my body. The methodical path of my nerves was a surprise to me, although what else was I expecting: a tangle of cords?
How does the butcher reconcile having two shoulder blades and a flank and shoulder knife?
My inflamed nerve nudges me again. I’ve been wondering about the suburbs of the body: are they arbitrary, inherent, or something else? I have become fixated on the hips and waist as some kind of shifting boundary between ‘tops’ and ‘bottoms’. My mind veers to the question of borders: where exactly, say, does the wrist become the hand? I drift along the edges of each anatomic district, thinking tentative thoughts about how they’re framed in work, clothing, sex, fitness; their histories in love and medicine, trade and slavery—before feeling guilty for the luxury of my inconclusiveness. If body parts carry so much danger and tenderness, care and butchery reaching back to prehistory, why does everyone else seem so comfortable with their articulation?
Butchers experiment, and the divisions they make do change. They create new cuts for a desired texture, mass, price point. Fat comes in and out of vogue. Cuts are cultural; I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that ‘worldview' is shorthand for a way of carving the totality of everything into digestible portions. The knife is always being blunted and sharpened. I hear it grazing my bones sideways sometimes—ching, ching, ching.
Are rooms and buildings and blocks and suburbs and cities additions to land (as in: new layers, adaptations and augmentations) or are they subdivisions of it? Does separation always imply pain? When I stand in a lake, am I a part of the lake? I’m shocked to realise I haven’t seen the sky in days. I want to be a dish of water, humming gently in the sunlight. Decisions are divisions too. The knife doesn’t feel good in my hand, but it continues to rest on my fingers anyway.
I’m learning about all kinds of separations. For instance, the kind where you find the gap between a set of closed curtains, slide your hand between them and pull to one side. Or the kind where you tear something in half, because if I can’t have it, you can’t either.
2. Rinse and repeat
3. Separation of the thighs
Speak for yourself, but I think—
Well, I think we’re all squatting over a mirror, asking where do I end and where do I begin.
Is this thing on?
Should, would, could, can and do—you?
Where do I end and where should I finish?
Where do I begin? All I got was this melted candle. Speak for yourself.
4. Twin flame separation
In Year Six, my science teacher, Ms Cunningham, showed the class a video about spontaneous human combustion. The gist of this contested phenomenon is that people inexplicably catch fire and burn to death, often leaving behind mysteriously unburned hands and feet. Weirdly, they’re not found in positions that would suggest any awareness, panic, or attempt to extinguish the flames.
I wonder where this mystery resides now. Was it like sudden infant death syndrome, also prevalent in my memory of the 1990s, then quietly retracted from mainstream concern? Remember Red Nose Day? I read that many supposed cases of spontaneous human combustion were linked to alcoholism. I fall asleep. Half an hour later, I dream that my jacket sleeve catches the flame of a tealight candle and I’m on fire.
You can’t really study spontaneous human combustion. Because it’s spontaneous, there’s no predicting who will burst into flames, or when. You’re minding your business (or quite possibly not) when the room begins to flicker orange. You’re licked. To burn, a fire needs oxygen, heat and fuel.
5. Separation of the means / an end
and another cease choices convenient
delivery delivery drawn for from if is
make may not or quarterly receiving
reply reschedule scheduled shipment
stop this to today updates visit website
you your
6. Separate bedrooms
In the cove, you dig at the mouths of crab burrows with a stick
while I stay back, weary of owning my weight on the sand.
Let loose in a candy store. Do you become ill
or do you become candy?
7. Separation of head and arse
Separation (Interlude)
8. Stop and go
9. Now/ever
—say it until the edges are smoothed like pebbles in a creek. Tell it to your fingers until your cuticles no longer catch on fleece. Say it about everything—every single thing ever—because the world is a knitted glove for those five syllables to slide faultlessly into, snapping its empty, floppy fingers to attention.
I’m asking you to say it, yes, because I am facetious. I don’t really want you to say it. And I’m asking because if you do, in your heart, believe that this now could truly be dripping with meaning and urgency, then please tell me. If you think time can hoist its head far enough above the waves to look you in the eye—straighten my hands from the palms outward and call me to attention too.
No matter which way you turn my hand, my hollow fingers point to the ground.
10. Separation of magic and eye
Regular things can assume novel meanings, even briefly. Earlier this evening, I walked into the dark lounge room of my apartment to fetch a book. A small white light on the far wall suddenly frightened me as it blinked off—what if it had been dimmed by the presence of an uninvited body in the room?
It could be worse. When I was young, maybe eight or nine years old, I became terrified by a TV news report about ghosts, supposedly seen (and much worse, photographed) by residents of a Tasmanian nursing home. Witnesses described orbs and other shapes of light emerging from the walls of the facility. The photographs seasoned their accounts with verity.
For more than a year after that bulletin, I slept with my bedroom light on and my head buried beneath the doona, its edges wrapped like a hood around my nose so that only my mouth was exposed (reluctantly, for breathing). Mum couldn’t console me as she might have (stroking my back while I stared at a slightly menacing Humpty Dumpty lamp): after all, what if something happened and she, too, became a ghost?
Before and after the ghost year, I would stare at the wallpaper, which was printed with a tight repeating pattern of rhomboid shapes in metallic bronze and grey. Surrendering focus, it gave a sort of disappointing—but still addictive—pre-Magic Eye effect. Disappointing because the illusion revealed nothing more than a shimmering, 3D-adjacent flatness.
During the ghost year, the wall was off-limits. Looking, let alone staring, seemed like tempting fate—basically daring a ghost to show itself. The dark had not really worried me in the past, but suddenly it was terrifying, a scrim that laid the ideal conditions for seeing a luminous phantom. As my parents had asked me not to leave the hall light on (they were surprisingly accommodating about the bedroom light), I’d flick the switch and sprint the five dark metres to my room, skin pricked with fear.
Of course I knew that hiding under the covers with the lights on was a pointless contradiction. The most terrifying thing imaginable was that something could simply appear without warning, with no respect for walls. What kinds of horrible feelings could this thing unleash with its touch? No physical boundary could protect me, and certainly not the flimsy barrier of a few bedsheets.
If it’s coming for me, I don’t want to see it coming.
11. Banana/lemon
Jon.
Jaune?
I suppose.
Nobody has ever called me a ‘banana’ before, because even bullies recognise the defeat of having to explain an insult. And besides, if I put to one side my black hair and narrow, sleepy eyes, I can never quite judge if I’m more white than yellow even on the outside. If you can see that a mile off—well, you know, you’re not like the others!
Am I really so liminal… or am I nominal? Sometimes I wish I’d had the guts to go full lemonal. Yellow on the outside and on the inside: a sour heart!
Instead, you press your palm to the ridged aluminium door handle of a rural Chinese restaurant, and there I am on the Lazy Susan. Round and round, no need to reach across the table.
12. Sold separately
By weight, the average chicken egg has twice as much white as yolk. Shells account for about 10% of the weight of an egg. Crushed egg shells are commonly sold as chicken feed.
13. Separation of horse and state
14. Day/night
Should we rebel against the codes and embedded routines of day and night, or let them be what they are?
15. Separation
When you live on the same timeline as another person, it’s too easy to lose your sense of synchronicity. Though you may be aware of them, you can’t help accessing them mostly through memory. Photographs and texts are out-of-date from the moment they are committed. When we are face-to-face with one another, it can be nearly impossible to share one another’s experience of time, even as it passes between you.
Is it just me? I have been guilty of taking my time to think, and I have imagined the person I am thinking about is frozen on our last interaction. Or at least their movements drag, as legs do when submerged in water. To require too much time to understand anything, and to feel confident in your understanding, is a curse. It is a curse to forget the hearts beating in real-time around you, whether your people are asleep, or on the toilet, or in a conversation—or thinking about the same things you are, and running laps around you.
I meet a friend for coffee, and for once, I’m not the last to arrive. We discover that both of us have set our watches forward in attempts to manipulate the space between our-time and real-time. 7 minutes, 13 minutes, 22 minutes, 31 minutes. The rule we seem to agree on is that even divisions of 5 or 10 are too easily calculated and should be avoided. Regardless, we each remain chronically untimely—our authority to set such rules should be questioned.
I have been struggling to respond to text messages from my friends. I am very fond of them, but I am floating away from shared time. The message tone steps in for the pendulum; feeling apace with the world, I might respond quickly, only for the clock to slow and my interest in putting thoughts into words to disappear. I can’t reach myself. I won’t be reached by you. I love you and I have so little to say for myself that it seems unfair to only listen. Switch the lights off when you leave a room. Out of my window, through the glass bricks of the neighbouring building, I see the puddled blue, purple and white shapes of uniformed women gathering for lunch.
Memories, as I said, are out-of-date from the moment they are committed, and yet they’re all we can do to keep ourselves together. If you are lucky in life (in its chapters; in your emotional disposition), you won’t shy away from planting your flags in the places you visit, or stealing away with a pebble. If you are unlucky, you will shy away from the risk. At some point, you might be unlucky enough to wake to a landscape of pollen, hoping your allergies change as you age.
Move inland, and years pass. Your head peeks occasionally above the surface of this lake. No conversations before coffee. Your phone is somewhere half-hidden by a blanket, draining itself nobly over nothing important. A relaxed performance of whale song.
Jon Tjhia is a radio maker, musician, artist and writer. He is the co-founder of the podcast Paper Radio. He works as senior digital editor at the Wheeler Centre, where he publishes the Australian Audio Guide as well as award-winning projects including the digital publication Notes, and The Messenger, a podcast.
His radio and sound works have been broadcast on radio stations around the anglosphere. They have been played at Manchester Literature Festival and the Barbican (UK), performed on stage at Sydney Opera House and Arts Centre Melbourne, heard on the podcasts Short Cuts, Constellations and The Truth, and written about in The New Yorker, The Wire and The Age. He is a member of the Manus Recording Project Collective, whose installation how are you today was recently shown at the Ian Potter Museum of Art and City Gallery (Aotearoa). Jon was a member of bands including Speed Painters, ii and Aleks and the Ramps.
